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May 14, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:42:21
LIVE IN BUDAPEST: What We Can Learn from the Old World | Dave Rubin | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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unidentified
Several years ago, I became familiar with this name, Dave Rubin.
Rubin, Rubin.
What is Dave Rubin doing?
I keep hearing a buzz about him.
And this is when you started your Locals format.
And I said, okay, what is Locals?
Oh, it's this great free speech platform that this comedian named Dave Rubin has founded.
I think I want to join this.
So I signed up.
I paid my little bit of money.
And I loved the platform.
And as someone who was really concerned about the censorship that was happening in various parts of the media, on YouTube, hearing about people being shadow banned, etc., I really appreciated what Dave was doing in creating a platform for free speech.
And then, the next thing you know, Dave, I actually responded to one of the messages that I sent him to say, Dave, I'd love for you to come to Budapest.
And I'm just this disembodied person sending him a message, and he was very kind enough to respond and refer me to his PA at that time, who now is, I think, in Nashville.
And she was kind enough to work with me.
And we got Dave to participate in our Canceling Council Culture program that was held during the height of the COVID.
And unfortunately, we were still in lockdown.
So many of the presenters, like Dave, participated via Zoom.
And this was like the greatest thing ever.
And he was so kind to do this.
And then, you know, it's like, what is Dave doing now?
And they approached Dave, and they wanted to do a deal with Dave.
So now Locals is a part of Rumble.
And to show you what a true, in it for the fight, Dave is, he didn't just cash out and take his money from Rumble.
He exchanged his stock.
I got that right?
Good.
And so he is in it.
He is really just this great, wonderful person who has taken on this issue of censorship and take it on in a really personal way.
And I just think it's the most fascinating story that here is this comedian.
Who is doing more than any politician that I know of to help protect free speech, which is the First Amendment in the U.S., as we know.
And so without further ado, may I please introduce Dave Rubin.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you guys, and thank you for the kind words.
Now that you're all familiar with my stock portfolio, we can begin.
I don't give any stock tips.
I hope you don't mind the handheld mic instead of the podium.
People always want me to run for something, and I feel like if I get to a podium...
I have to say, I'm quite moved.
We're just coming back from nine days in Israel.
We flew in this morning, and so I'm quite accustomed, after six days in Jerusalem, to all of this stone, which really, it's history.
It's history.
And when we were putting this trip together, and we got the call to come to Budapest, come to Hungary, and do some things in Israel, We thought there really is something that we can try to find that we're all searching for right now.
And I think some good things are happening in Israel.
There's clearly some good things happening in Hungary.
There's some good things happening in America, but we're missing something that I think is beginning to be kind of unfurled here, and maybe in Israel as well, that I wanted to talk about today.
Before I get into any of that, I want to promise you guys that this will be a one-of-a-kind speech, because I try, as you know, as many of you probably know, I toured with Jordan Peterson for about a year and a half, 2018 and 2019, about 120 shows, 20 countries, and he never gave the same lectures.
I think the ideas that Jordan has put forth in the world are the things that are going to correct so much of what is wrong with all of our cultural institutions, our political institutions, our technological institutions, and all of those things.
First, I thought I would just tell you a little bit about my political adventure for some of you that maybe are not so familiar with me.
And it's funny because I just sat down with a bunch of Hungarian media for about an hour beforehand and I was trying to figure out, well, what am I going to talk about tonight?
sort of where am I at mentally, and having come off this trip, especially being in Israel where...
They're doing history and future.
They're trying to balance these two things.
And I think that really is what almost all Western societies are trying to do right now.
It was very clear I hadn't been to Israel in about seven years.
They're building up very fast, meaning the country's just going up.
Roads and buildings and skyscrapers everywhere, new cities.
Absolutely remarkable.
They're making the desert bloom.
It's green everywhere.
It's just incredible in a place with very few natural resources.
But they're also digging down.
They're excavating.
And they're uncovering the history of their people and really of Western civilization.
And that was sort of what our thesis was when we were trying to figure out how we were going to do this trip.
What are we looking for in Israel and Hungary, as I said, that is happening?
That is right.
That is right, because there is so much that is not right.
So, before I get to all of that, a little bit on my personal history, because, you know, we throw around these words, classical, liberal, conservative, all of these terms, and people sort of don't know what these things mean anymore.
I think we're going through a massive reshift of virtually everything politically.
There's new alliances to be had.
20 some odd years into social media and all the algorithmic tricks that are silencing us and shadow banning us and boosting some people and de-boosting other people and all of these things.
And we're trying to figure out how do we kind of get through this.
So very briefly, in terms of my own sort of political evolution, I was a lefty most of my life.
I grew up in New York.
Democrat family.
We were liberals.
Now, liberalism, of course, at least from an American perspective, wasn't always what liberalism is now.
There was a moderate force within liberalism.
John F. Kennedy Jr. was a liberal.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
That was an idea that was a Democrat principle.
He was anti-war.
He was low tax.
He wanted to reduce taxes.
These were Democrat principles, and that was sort of the Democrat tradition that I kind of grew up in.
And then, of course, in the last 15 years or so, probably more so in the last 10 years, decade or so, something happened to the liberals.
Crazy left.
They all became this thing that we now call progressive, which in essence, as here in Eastern Europe, is far more in common with communism or socialism or any of the other horrific collectivist movements of the past than anything that had to do with any sort of American value or anything related to freedom or individual liberty or anything like that.
But it really caught on, and it caught on in a really crazy way, and I think it basically sideswiped everybody, where suddenly all of our cultural institutions, our political institutions, our mainstream media, big tech, everything sort of started pushing this crazy, what we all now refer to as wokeism, it started pushing this on us, that your identity...
I shouldn't say we all know.
Any somewhat evolved person knows that this is simply not the truth.
I could look around this room and if you think that I could attain anything by looking at any one of you and thinking, well, there's someone.
He's a guy.
He's middle-aged.
He's white.
He must think this.
I mean, that really is the essence of prejudice, right?
What is prejudice?
Prejudice is to prejudge.
And yet we've somehow done something now where our entire Our entire sort of running ethos, and from an American perspective, is based on the things that are completely counter to individual liberty, which is what the country was set up on.
And this sort of just rampaged through absolutely everything, and it led to a situation where a guy like me who was a lefty, I started waking up to some of this stuff and saying, hey, you know, something's not right here, guys.
what's going on, all I started to do All I started to do was talk to some people on the right.
And I talked to guys that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, like Larry Elder and Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager and Glenn Beck.
And what I found was I had some political disagreements with them, but I found them to be thoughtful and they knew what they thought and why they thought it.
But more than anything, I found them to be sort of generous of spirit.
There was a kindness there and an ability to agree to disagree.
And that, I thought, was a liberal tradition.
Unfortunately, it no longer is.
So right now in America, we have this really wild balance.
Well, we had a balance, and now we have a disbalance.
We have an unbalance, I would say, which is that one party has gone completely off the deep end.
And that's scaring an awful lot of people.
And clearly, America, which is the leader of the world for a lot of good reasons, right?
We created this country in 250 years.
We brought more peace and acceptance and decency and opportunity and the pursuit of happiness to more people in the world than could have ever been imagined.
It is the greatest human experiment ever.
And yet we right now have a movement in America that is completely counter to that.
And it is fueled by big tech.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
It is fueled by the Democrat Party and the media establishment and all of those things.
unidentified
And now it seems to be being exported, right?
It seems to be being exported so that I'm here in Hungary talking about this because you have a version of this.
And I was in Israel yesterday talking about this because they have a version of this.
And the question is, well, how did it...
How did this happen?
So that suddenly we are now questioning things that we know we don't have to question anymore.
My friend Douglas Murray, who I'm sure many of you are familiar with, the great conservative author, he constantly talks about how we had all of these problems solved.
Basic problems were solved.
And now we've decided to unearth all of these things.
That basically, now the barbarians are at the gate and we're debating what gender pronouns they are.
This is a problem.
This is a real problem.
Instead of dealing with the issues head on, we're suddenly wondering, are there biological differences between boys and girls?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
And should this be discussed privately with teachers and students hiding that from parents?
unidentified
I mean, these are crazy issues.
We all know they're crazy.
And I think one of the reasons we sort of lose constantly, I always say on the show, we're just constantly sucked to this slow descent to hell with these people, is because those of you that are here that are broad.
And my first book was a full defense of classical liberalism, and it's kind of funny.
It's hard for me from an American perspective to say that I'm a liberal anymore, and it probably is for some of you guys as well.
Because the word liberal has been so hijacked and we could do a whole different talk on that.
But for anyone here that's broadly conservative right now, and what I mean by that is you basically believe in reality.
You believe in biology.
You want limited government.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
You believe that you have some autonomy over your life.
unidentified
The reason we keep losing, the reason we keep being sucked into that seemingly bottomless pit is because we have jobs.
We have families.
We have other things to do.
And the other guys don't.
They really don't.
They've put everything into...
They don't have jobs.
They don't have good hairstylists either.
And they wouldn't kill them to hit the gym.
But there really is something to that.
There is a set of people right now in all of these Western countries that are hell-bent on demolishing the goodness of the West.
And we have to figure out a way around it.
And it has hit everything.
As some of you guys know, I lived in California for the last eight years, and a year and a half ago, post-COVID and post-lockdowns and mandates and injections and riots and all of the craziness, crime and defunding the police and everything else, I couldn't take it anymore, and I moved to the free state of Florida.
And I talk about Florida a lot on the show because one of the things that's happening in Florida I think is something that probably, that seems to be happening here where I think Hungary seems to be sort of blueprinting for Europe how other European nations can go ahead and exist and defend your borders, defend your culture as you see fit.
It's your right to do that.
It's not another nation's right to do that.
You guys as Hungarians will figure out.
How to go forward and how to live freely and all of those things.
But that's very counter, obviously, to a much bigger globalist operation, right?
And in America, we beautifully have a federalist system.
We have this idea that you can bounce around from state to state.
If you don't like it in America, you're not happy in Cali?
Well, you don't have to leave America.
You don't have to go to California or you don't have to go to Mexico or Canada, right?
You can actually just...
You can go to Florida and live almost a completely different life.
And I can tell you, having lived in California, with the crime and the drugs and all of the stuff, I moved to Florida, where there's low taxes, there's low regulation, there's a respect for individual rights and autonomy, we're removing the woke stuff out of the schools.
All of the things that I sense that you guys really want here, and which were most of the questions that I got from the Hungarian media before joining you tonight, It's happening in America.
And now what's happening is Florida is now blueprinting that and sending it across the nation.
So school choice, for example, instead of just funding systems that are endlessly failing, we're now funding students in Florida.
And then you can take that credit and you can go to a public school or a private school or a charter school or homeschool, whatever it might be.
But you as the parent have some autonomy in that so that your children will not be brainwashed.
That's now happening in Iowa.
It's happening in South Dakota and a bunch of other states.
And it's not just on the woke stuff.
We're getting ESG out of our governmental institutions.
We're doing all of the things right.
We're funding the police when we get illegals that are brought into Florida.
We send them to Martha's Vineyard, and then we very quickly find out how tolerant the liberals are.
Do you guys know that Barack Obama has a 30-acre estate on the water in Martha's Vineyard?
On the water, which makes you wonder if he believes any of this climate change nonsense.
That's one thing, right?
But 30 acres.
There were about 30 illegals that Ron DeSantis sent to Martha's Vineyard.
Obama could have given each of them an acre.
Right?
Each of them an acre.
And instead, they got rid of them, what?
Like, in 24 hours.
It was really just remarkable.
Which is consistent with what we see out of almost everything with the lesbies these days.
They have very easy solutions to very complex problems.
And usually if you just pull that...
There's not much there.
There's a lot of outrage.
There's a lot of hysteria.
There's a lot of anger.
But there aren't really good ideas.
And that's why so much is so broken in America right now.
And it's, again, why I wanted to do this trip.
Because I wanted to see what was right in Israel.
What's going right in Hungary so that I can help bring it back to America.
Because we actually need help right now.
I mean, that's becoming very obvious to me.
You know, the multicultural nature of America.
Which again is remarkably incredible.
The idea that people from all walks of life, from every corner on earth, could come to the same place.
And because they believe that they have some purpose, the pursuit of happiness, that they could pursue happiness, that they could build a great nation is really incredible.
But 250 years into this thing, we're...
We really are.
Now, we have pockets where it's working.
Obviously, Florida is one of them.
But as a nation, we are somewhat lost.
And what I was finding in Israel is that there still seems to be a purpose there.
They just celebrated their 75th anniversary, and there seemed to be a real purpose.
The people did not forget why they created the nation in the first place.
They have all sorts of external problems.
They have internal problems with this judicial reform bill.
But when you walk around there, We walk around Jerusalem and you see people, first off, the people of every color and creed and all of those things, all of the diversity that really doesn't matter that much because, of course, intellectual diversity is what actually matters.
But you see all of these people, they're still trying to build something.
And something has happened in America where we don't know what we're trying to build anymore.
And that's why it feels like it's crumbling.
I would say fairly quickly, and unfortunately now, because of tech and because of a media that is exacerbating the situation, the question is, will we be the world leader?
And I suspect if I polled all of you guys right now, you probably still do want America to be the world leader to some extent.
But right now, and I say this as an American, this is on foreign soil, which is a hard thing to say.
I don't know that you should trust us that much right now.
Right?
Like, I don't know that we're doing it.
And if we don't do it, it's going to be much worse.
I think most people recognize that.
So having talked about Florida a little bit, when I sat down with the journalists before coming up here, everybody was asking me about this Trump-DeSantis thing.
So I wanna just address that quickly.
It's interesting, because Trump was an excellent president from my position.
I didn't vote for him the first time around.
I did vote for him the second time around.
I've interviewed him.
I'm friends with his children.
They all live in Florida.
His whole family lives in Florida.
I think our economy was great.
The world was sort of lined up correctly.
Things were really working under Trump.
And had COVID not happened, I think we'd be in a very different situation right now.
I think we'd be in a successful second term for him.
The left would still be going nuts.
We would be doing things properly.
Almost if you basically took virtually everything that we're doing now and you just reversed it.
That's where we'd be and things would be better.
So everyone keeps asking, well, Dave, where do you stand on this Trump-DeSantis thing?
because that's really where this thing seems to be heading.
And as much as I supported Trump the first time around, I sense...
We need a shock to the system.
The way that Trump was a shock to the system the first time around, and no one thought it could happen, and all of the excitement of Twitter and the trolling and all those things, it was the thing that nobody thought could happen, and it did happen.
I'm sensing we need that again, but a slightly different version of it.
What I'm sensing right now is that we need a shock to the system.
We need a shot to the system of someone getting up there and doing exactly what they say they're going to do and doing it right and lining up an agenda and basically like dominoes, knocking those things down.
And that really is what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
And I think people all over the world, I mean, I'm getting emails literally every day from Hungary and plenty of other countries, from Japan.
people are like, can this really happen?
Can we actually...
To those simple founding documents and we can have a country that is sane again and not have to do this mass migration that we're doing across the United States.
Because on one hand, it really is nice.
As I said, federalism is really great.
You can pick up and go.
If you guys aren't happy here in Budapest, you can move to the suburbs and it'll perhaps be a little more conservative or something like that.
But you really would have to leave the country if it really started changing.
We don't have to do that.
And that's a beautiful thing if we can fix the federal system.
And I think there is a chance to do it.
And I also think, and I can sort of read it when I talk to people about it, wouldn't it be nice if things just kind of got normal again?
You know?
Wouldn't it be?
Like, wouldn't that be something?
You can applaud, normalcy.
Yeah.
People don't even remember what normalcy is, right?
I mean, these last couple years, between COVID, between all of the big tech censorship, Between the media lying to us about everything, and I think you guys have a version of that as well, the media has lied about every big story.
Everything.
If you just took everything the media did and you reversed all of it, if you picked up the New York Times, we were at the hotel this morning here in Hungary and I saw the New York Times and it's very rare that I see a print newspaper anymore.
And I looked at the headlines and I was like, man, this is just propaganda.
But CNN is doing it, and the New York Times are doing it, and the Washington Post is doing it.
And then when you look at big tech, where big tech is then censoring stories for them, right?
The Hunter Biden laptop, which we now know it was all true, and a whole bunch of us thought it.
Or a whole bunch of us thought that the Russia collusion thing with Trump was a lie.
But we couldn't really say it because they'd shadow ban you or delete you altogether.
Or a whole bunch of us thought that it might be a Wuhan lab leak, or that mandates were coming.
As they were telling us they weren't coming.
All of these things, they lied about every single big story.
So I think what we're all kind of struggling with right now, and again, this is why I wanted to take this trip, to figure out what it is we can take from the old world.
Because there were good things in the old world, great thinkers of the old world, incredible people who built unbelievably...
I mean, what an unbelievable city you have here.
Absolutely gorgeous.
That you guys are now rebuilding, right?
I mean, it's incredible.
We have to take some things from the old world, and we have to bring them into the new world.
We have to figure out what is this new world going to be.
And I think linking that to the sort of political situation, we need a leader at this point, and I don't think all the answers are political.
I really don't.
I think that, you know, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture.
So you have to fix the culture first, and then maybe you can fix the politics.
You can't just magically find someone who politically is going to do it right and then just fix all of your problems.
That's not really the way it works.
If you can fix a few things, I think in almost every situation it's a bottom-up approach.
If you can fix a few things in your life first, whatever that means, to link it back to Jordan Peterson, if you can stand up straight with your shoulders back, if you can clean your room, do a few things in your own life.
And conservatives are pretty good at this sort of thing.
Conservatives generally have jobs and wear clothes that fit.
It's sort of a thing.
If you can do a little bit of that, and then you can start fixing some of the culture, because when they come to you and they say, actually, we're going to teach your seven-year-old in second grade who's a boy that they're actually a girl, and you actually have the fortitude to say, no, you're not, or I'm going to remove my student from this school, or you're going to fight it by showing up to a board meeting, Or whatever it might be.
Then you can start resetting things.
One of the videos that I did for PragerU, and I'm sure many of you guys are familiar with PragerU, I think the third video I did was called The Bravery Deficit.
Because we seem to just be afraid of everything all the time.
We're afraid if we say something.
We're afraid we're going to lose our job.
We're afraid an anonymous, amorphous Twitter mob is going to come and say mean things to us.
And it's kind of all true, right?
That's not made up.
You might, and I have no doubt, if I polled every single one of you, everyone in this room, perhaps myself included, we're not always saying everything we know to be true, right?
Because there are consequences for that.
But the more we do that, We just acquiesce.
We just give grounds for the people who would gladly control us and silence us to do that.
And we've given them an awful lot of air.
And I think what's happening now, finally, is enough people are just like, no.
No more of this nonsense.
We cannot do this anymore.
We don't want to repeat the same mistakes that led...
We don't want to end up in that place, and yet we seem very close to it.
So I've tried, in terms of interviewing people, I've tried to interview people from across the political spectrum to kind of come up with the right answers on this stuff.
It's interesting because we were in D.C., Washington, D.C., about a month ago.
We took three days in D.C., and we emailed everybody.
Everybody in town.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Congress was in session.
unidentified
They were just coming back.
So we knew that every politician was going to be there.
So we emailed about 18 Republicans, and literally everybody said yes, except then Mitch McConnell, actually, he fell, so he couldn't do it, and then in a bizarre twist, Rand Paul fell.
I only mention this because it shows you just all the weirdness that is happening in America right now.
But the point is, we got 16 Republicans.
I didn't tell them any of the questions beforehand.
Interviewed them, went great.
We asked about 20 Democrats.
You know how many Democrats we got?
Zero.
And that's not the white power sign.
That's a zero.
We got zero.
Not only do we get zero, the only one, we got one response.
It was Rashida Tlaib, who I probably think is the worst of the worst.
At least her office responded, no, everybody else just ignored us.
But I mention that because the only way we're going to get through any of this, the only way we're going to figure out...
We've got to figure out a way to rescue the sane people on the other side.
And they are there, guys.
I have no doubt that within your own families, we all have this right now, it's getting harder and harder to talk about politics, right?
And it's partly because politics has become religion, especially for the left.
Politics has become the most sort of all-encompassing thing that dictates their daily life.
And then you wonder why they're so hysterical all the time.
Because they wake up every morning and there's another outrage.
There's another cause.
There's something else.
They now want to believe the science.
They want to believe in COVID.
The same people.
The same people who, you know, five years ago.
We're telling us all, you know, my body, my choice, right?
That's what they were saying.
My body, my choice when it came to abortion and women's rights and reproductive health and that sort of thing.
They were the most hysterical when it came to forcing you to inject things in your body.
And part of the reason that they won't talk right now, and I wonder, and maybe we can find this out in the panel, I wonder for you guys if it's as bad here as it is in America.
Part of the reason they won't talk right now is because the ideas just aren't that great.
But they own so much of the cultural and political and media landscape that they can keep winning.
They can keep winning without having to debate.
So when I was doing these interviews beforehand, just an hour ago or so, all of the interviewers asked me the same thing.
why is it that Republicans keep losing?
If we're so sure that we're basically, we've got the right ideas and...
Well, why do Republicans keep losing?
Why don't more people wake up?
And I think there's plenty of reasons for that.
A lot of it's sort of insider baseball politics.
But part of it, I think, is a massive branding problem.
And it's a branding problem that led us to losing all the institutions in the first place.
You guys have families that you care about.
You have jobs that you care about.
It's not your cause to be out there trying to change the world.
You're trying to change it in kind of a marginal way in your own life.
And that's really the way it's supposed to be.
But they went all the way to the end.
They went to the end and they said, we will basically try to own the world.
And that's what we have to fight against.
And we're watching this all over the world right now.
So on the tech front, You know, what's been so good, like, we get these little moments, guys, right?
We get these little moments where we get some goodness.
One of the major good points in the last year is that Elon Musk bought Twitter.
And we found out that a bunch of the stuff that we kind of thought was true, were we being shadow banned?
Were we being silenced?
Was the government, was the United States government, which is supposed to abide by the First Amendment, the government cannot stifle your free speech.
The government was working with a giant corporation to silence people.
And again, whether that's the Hunter Biden laptop, whether that's the COVID mandates, etc.
But this stuff was happening.
Now, it's kind of funny.
In some regards, it's like we then have these hearings on these things and nobody ever gets fired.
Nobody pays the price and the machine just kind of keeps moving.
And I think we have to recognize that you can sort of get little wins here and there.
I heard Tucker Carlson say that once.
You can get little wins here and there, but you probably can't move the entire machine.
So we can expose stuff, and we can wake people up.
But you're probably not just going to re-engineer the entire system.
You probably aren't.
And then, in a case of Tucker Carlson, and a few of you have asked me about Tucker today, sometimes you can scare the machine enough that you're out of a job.
Which is, I suppose, a little scary, but I think there's some ways that he can get back in the game that'll be quite effective.
I think Rumble might be one option for him.
So we're fighting everything, right?
We're fighting a media that lies to us.
We're fighting tech that is operating against us.
We're fighting political people that want to be more political than us.
Right?
Like, I just know it.
I just know you guys don't wake up every day.
Even all of you that are here because you care about politics.
You don't wake up really, like, thinking about politics as the first most important thing.
And you shouldn't.
And you shouldn't.
So, I'm trying to figure out how we can balance all of these things.
How we can get back to some of these good conversations.
I think we can do it.
I think that, as I said, I think DeSantis really is the guy that can get us out of the mess.
Imagine if we all just woke up and we had good leaders again.
If we just had good leaders again, I think we can fix this in probably about two years.
I really do.
So that's what I'm here in Hungary for.
And that's what I'm looking forward to chatting with everyone up at this panel about.
And I think that was roughly my time for this portion.
And we'll sit and chat with everybody.
What do you think?
About all of this stuff?
All right.
First of all, many thanks indeed.
I agree with almost all of it, so it's hard for me to know what question to ask.
Normally I'm fueled by disagreement.
But I would say that since you have been here, not as long as obviously you will stay in total, but since you have been here a few days, what are the two or three things that you've noticed about Hungary?
Yeah, so actually I've only been in Hungary for just a few hours.
We actually got in late this morning.
But I can tell you, having chatted with, well, a couple of you guys, and having chatted with some of the members of the media, it seems fairly obvious to me that you guys are addressing the actual issues that are the problem, which is why almost everyone that I chatted with the media asked me about the same issue.
I think fighting this woke thing, really, something about the trans thing, which I didn't really talk about that much.
There's something about this thing now, really going for the children, that seems intentionally designed.
My own personal belief is that if you as an adult wish to live however you want, you want to...
You want to dress like a man and you're a woman.
You want to be in this or that relationship.
Once you're an adult, you can do whatever you want.
That's my own personal belief.
I know that's not everybody's belief.
And I tend to come more on a libertarian perspective on that.
But when they go for the children, and that really is one of the things that put DeSantis on the map.
We know this was happening.
And it sounds like it's happening in some of your schools as well.
There were teachers that were literally talking to children about sexuality and gender identity that were doing this privately without the parents' knowledge, and they were doing it for months on end, often referring to a child by a different name and all of these things.
And it's so incredibly outrageous, it's hard for people to really comprehend how twisted it is.
And it was school policy, too.
And it was school policy.
And not only was it school policy, but it was the secrecy that was the really twisted part of it.
You know what I mean?
You could potentially have a situation where a kid...
But you could have an issue where there's a kid who's a young teenager that would be having some of these issues.
And there could be some role for the school to play potentially.
But the fact that so much of it was done secretly...
One of the big wins we got politically in America in the last three years or so was that the election in Virginia, which Glenn Youngkin won, he went right in on this.
Every politician in America that has fought the culture wars really said, I'm going to fight this.
So in this case, he said, I'm going to get the woke stuff out of the schools.
He then won and became governor in Virginia.
Obviously, Ron DeSantis is sort of the main one from the Florida perspective, but this is happening now with Kristi Noem in South Dakota and a couple others as well.
When you fight it, people then start getting a little bit braver.
And that's really what we need more.
But they're going after the children because they're trying, you know, I say it on the show all the time, they're trying to break everybody's brains.
And once they break your child's brain and they can bring that into your home and then...
Actually, that was one really interesting lesson that I learned from being in Israel for last week.
Israelis, they fight and argue about everything.
It's a very political society because of the security issues and all that.
But a few people told me that for the first time ever, it's coming into the home in a way that is now becoming more destructive.
And I think that's intentionally designed...
And until we can get it out of the home and that's why they're going after kids, it will just keep coming and replicating.
I was just going to say there's a side issue of some importance.
The right of parents to control their children's education is specifically protected quite high up in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.
I think it's something like Article 12. Until the last couple of years, I have never heard anyone on the left specifically attack that right, even when reminded where it is enshrined.
I haven't until recently heard anyone on the left attack, for example, the right of free speech or the First Amendment.
But now, people on the left actually argue this very straightforwardly, clearly.
And without disguise.
Indeed, not only people on the left, because, of course, at the moment, there are institutions of the U.S. government engaged in combating disinformation, which are themselves making statements, criticizing free speech and, to some degree, democracy.
That's what I find most remarkable.
Do you want to comment on that?
Well, it's interesting because, you know, in California right now, they are trying to make California a sanctuary state for under- It used to be you'd have to have several letters from psychologists, you'd have to be in therapy for a certain amount of years, all of those things.
They've already eliminated most of those requirements, but now if the parent, so let's say you're in Florida, where they have now banned, by the way, it's a passed law.
Just through this congressional session that just closed last week.
It is a passed law.
They are now banning gender reassignment surgery.
And by the way, you should never call it gender affirming surgery.
That's constantly what they do, and we always use their language.
And it's a really bad mistake, right?
It is not affirming.
I would argue it's probably the least affirming thing that you could do if you were trying to affirm someone's gender to actually chop their genitals off.
But California is now actually going out of their way to say we will be a sanctuary state for these children.
So it really, this is dystopian.
I mean, this is 1984 level stuff where they want to take your children from you.
And once they do that...
And last thing on this, that's why they were pushing the vaccines on children so hard.
They knew if you can get people who don't really understand what we're being injected with or why we are being injected, but I have to do it because I don't want to lose my job or whatever it might be.
It's one thing if you do it to yourself, right?
If you inject yourself or your spouse with this stuff.
But once you do it to your children and then you find out it really didn't work and now myocarditis and all of the other issues that are popping up, they've really got you.
And people really need to understand that that's happening.
You know, you bring up the question of states seizing children.
It's not just California.
Michigan does it.
Minnesota does it.
The state of Maine is debating it now.
I think Oregon and Washington, either they are going to do it or they've already done it.
People in this part of the world who came through communism, they see what's going on.
This was how the communists saw the relationship between the state and children.
The state took precedence over parents.
And that's one of the reasons I love living here.
I've lived here in Hungary for most of the last two years.
I expect to spend the rest of my life here.
For all the flaws that this country has, it's not paradise.
There's no such thing as paradise.
At least it feels real.
It feels like people haven't gone crazy here.
I've noticed that when American friends come over, I tell them, that's the first thing you need to know about this country.
It's normal.
And the second thing you need to know is, everything you've learned about Hungary from the American media is a lie.
Almost everything.
And it really is true.
And when people spend any time here, they've come to realize, oh yeah, that's it.
We brought Tucker Carlson over here, summer of 2021.
And thank God for him, because he spent a week here broadcasting.
He went and talked to Hungarians, actual Hungarians, about the lives they lead.
And he flipped the narrative in America.
So I'm so happy that finally now, it's not at the level of the senior Republican leadership, but at the grassroots.
The fact that you're here.
To see what's going on here is really important.
Well, it's getting there.
It's getting there.
I mean, first off, without going too far down the rabbit hole of what happened to Tucker, I mean, Tucker's out of a job at the moment.
It might partly be related to that.
He was starting to show people there is a model for a society that is good and decent.
But when you talk about reality, that also is why I think that the DeSantis thing really has teeth this time.
Because as opposed to, let's say, Trump's first go-around where he got rid of his opponents fairly quickly with some name-calling.
I really fundamentally believe this.
People just want something sane.
That's all they want.
Ten years ago, you would have said any of this gender stuff, or the neo-racism stuff, or that economics would be upside down, that you can just endlessly print money, that there should be no borders.
All of this, this is all stuff that ten years ago, virtually every Democrat would have said this is absolutely crazy.
And yet it is all mainstream right now.
So it's a beautiful thing.
I mean, it's exactly why I wanted to come here, to be around.
A place, people, and a place that are saying, hey, we have borders, we have a nation state.
We don't want to go the route that Germany has gone.
We don't want to go the route that France has gone.
And it seems to me that you guys are doing it properly, and you have some of the intellectual backing to do it, and now you have the political backing to do it.
And I can also tell you that, you know, we don't talk about Hungary a lot.
I mean, I guess Orban is a fascist.
That's the main thing we know.
That's all they say.
That was a joke, everybody.
That was a joke.
Victor Orban realized 12 years ago what Ron DeSantis is just starting to realize, that the old liberal model of politics in society is broken.
You know how it was when we were younger.
We were brought up to believe that politics is here, the private sector is here, and everybody works in their own sphere.
We all work together somehow.
I went to journalism school, graduated in 89, and we were still taught back then that the thing to do is to try to be fair.
That's so over.
Orban understood that the way power is really used in post-liberal society when the left has captured all of the private institutions, the only thing left to conservatives is politics, electoral politics, and we can't be afraid to use the power we have to stop them.
You know, it's interesting.
So I'm sure many of you know about the fight that DeSantis got in with Disney after the, again, quote unquote, don't say gay bill, which had nothing to do with being gay and the word gay wasn't even in the title, etc.
But suddenly a lot of conservatives, Mike Pence and Chris Christie and now Nikki Haley, a bunch of conservatives came out and said, oh no, he's wielding government power in a way that it should not be wielded because I thought we were the party of small government.
And it was a real flip on reality because what DeSantis did with Disney was take away special rights.
So if you believe in capitalism, you believe that every corporation, every company, every business, every individual should be treated the same under the law and then they're going to fail and succeed on their own merit.
DeSantis took away special rights.
They had special taxation rights.
They had special rights to water and an airport and a whole bunch of things that even if you just cared about amusement parks, that we have SeaWorld there and Universal Studios and Gator World.
There's a lot of gators in Florida.
They didn't have those rights.
So all he did was make them equal with all of the competition that they had.
And suddenly you had all these conservatives going, oh boy, this is a real misuse.
Of power.
And that goes to exactly what you're saying.
Unless you're a complete anarchist, you believe that a government should exist.
So if you believe that a government should exist, what's the one thing it should do?
It should be making sure that the playing field is equal for everybody.
That's exactly what he did, it sounds like.
It should make sure that business stays in its lane.
When I was a kid growing up, business did not involve itself in pushing radical social agendas and being what we call woke capitalists now.
That changed in the last decade or two.
And the only way we have to fight back is through the government, through elected power in the government.
Orban gets it.
And this is one of the reasons he went against George Soros so strongly.
And in our country.
In a way, I don't think Donald Trump does.
Because Donald Trump, for all of his virtues, did not have the focus and the policy discipline to actually follow through.
Well, I think one issue that Trump has – so I agree with your assessment there.
And again, I think that's also just a function of – I think DeSantis is 45. I'm fairly certain he's younger than me, if I'm not mistaken.
Someone could Google it to check.
But he grew up in a world that was a little bit before the Internet, but he grew up and became a man and became an adult in the world that we live in now.
Trump and Biden and Pelosi and the rest of these people, they're defending a world that doesn't really exist anymore.
To really show you a good example of that, one of my arguments for DeSantis has been that We need the mainstream media to die.
We really do.
And DeSantis, one of the things that he's done, right now he's not talking to NBC News anymore.
He is refusing as a policy to talk to NBC News.
And the reason he's doing it was because there was a series over a couple weeks.
They lied about like 10 different things in a row.
The highlight of them being that Andrea Mitchell, who's one of the premier correspondents on MSNBC, she was interviewing Kamala Harris.
And, you know, we had this other issue, the other one besides the don't say gay issue in Florida, was that DeSantis was getting woke stuff out of schools when it came to race as well.
So there was a black, an African-American AP studies course that they were pushing on kids in high school that also was going to have woke gender theory involved in black African-American studies.
I mean, it's so bananas, you can't even make sense of it.
But so he banned that one course.
He banned one course.
And then Andrea Mitchell is on NBC News interviewing the vice president about it.
And the question, I think I can almost get it verbatim.
She said to Kamala Harris, what is it that Ron DeSantis doesn't want Americans to know about slavery?
And it's like, it's such an absolutely enormous lie.
And DeSantis' team said no more.
We will not play this game.
Now, to get to your point on Trump, Trump will still play the game.
And that's part of the problem.
I've been trying to explain to people that Trump, in a way, he is part of the system now.
And he's feeding the system.
And that's unfortunate in a way.
Again, as somebody that, genuinely, I like him as a man.
But he's now part of the system.
He's giving it more energy.
The only way you beat this beast is to starve this beast.
And I think that that's what DeSantis will do.
It'll actually help an independent media rise, and it will let the archaic media just kind of fall away.
Just to get back a bit to the part where we were talking about separating public and private, and both of you mentioned this, how this was a cornerstone of our civilization.
And I think that's true, and I think it was only the Judeo-Christian civilization which had this.
And where I want to go from here is that I think this is on purpose.
So they want to destroy this because actually I don't think they want to live in a kind of an Orwellian society which we talk about a lot.
I think it's much more sinister.
I think they want to live in a brave new world.
And I think all the, you know, going after the kids, kind of, you know, the drug addiction problem, the porn problem, is all about kind of lulling people into this place where they don't really realize that they are living under a totalitarian dictatorship.
So I just was interested, how do you see that?
Do you think this is really happening?
And also, what can we do against this?
How do we get after these issues?
Because I think it's not just schools.
For example, the psychologists are full of this.
So if, let's say, a 12-year-old kid will go with depression to a psychologist, they will also say to that kid that you might have some transgender issue going on.
You're not depressed.
You must be in the wrong body.
So it's not just schools.
It's everywhere, basically.
Look, we have to understand we are in a technological revolution.
And we're in the adolescence of that.
It's funny.
I don't have my phone.
I usually have my phone on me like you guys all the time.
I handed it to my assistant right before we started.
But every one of you have an iPhone in your pocket.
And you have access to more information than anyone could have ever possibly imagined in the history of humanity.
But it's a tool.
It's sort of like fire, right?
Like fire is great.
It can warm up your house and cook your food.
But fire can also burn you and burn down that house.
We haven't figured out how to behave with these things yet.
Went crazy.
Now there's ChatGPT and OpenAI, and we're finding out that that has incredible political bias.
And the way that it's rewiring our brains, you know, for anyone here that's over probably 35, you might remember, remember the beginning of the internet when you would go to a website, right?
You'd go to ESPN.com, and they had 20 stories, and you'd scroll down to the bottom, and then it was done, right?
You were at the end of the internet.
It was amazing.
It was over.
The road was there.
That was it.
But then, what was it, about 15 years ago, I forget the guy's name, he invented Infinite Scroll.
And now we have Infinite Scroll.
On every app, on every webpage you go to, it never stops.
So now try to hand that to a kid.
We all know what it does to us as adults.
Infinite Scroll.
You can go on Twitter and you see a terrorist attack and then you see a picture of a baby and then Joe Biden said something stupid.
And it's like, what is that doing to us?
We are just bouncing around between hyper-crazy emotions.
On top of the fact that it's actually manipulated information I don't have access to Twitter, but he also had activists at the company writing code, so he still doesn't know how to unfurl all of that.
When I met with him a few months ago, that was my main takeaway.
It's not just that he had to buy this thing and correct it.
He has a ship that is completely rotted on the inside, and he's not even sure if that ship needs to be replaced altogether rather than just fixed.
But the point is, all of these things are manipulating us in crazy ways, and yes, in a sense, Why is there this push to get us all on the metaverse?
Why would you want to follow Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook basically into Ready Player One, if any of you saw the movie or read the book?
Why would you want to follow him there?
Did these things hand us?
Let's put it this way.
How many of us are more social because of social media, right?
I mean, I would say virtually nobody.
We're more angst-ridden.
We're more neurotic and all of those things.
So I think figuring out a way to behave, but it's personal, right?
I'm not for passing a law that you can't use your phone a certain amount of time or any of that kind of stuff.
And I think it should be up to the parents regarding the children.
But yes, we have handed 12-year-olds the world, some totality of the knowledge of human history, and let it be manipulated, and then handed it to them, say, go into your room, figure it out.
And then we wonder why everybody's crazy.
Posie Parker, the activist in England, anti-transfeminist, she was on a podcast with Louise Perry the other day.
And she said that she believes the trans phenomenon is just the tip of the iceberg, that it is the first step towards the war for reality.
That when AI comes in and transhumanism comes in and all that, we are going to have to fight a tremendous battle just to keep our heads in what is real.
What is human?
Because I think the AI stuff and all the robotic things coming in is really looking at what is human.
And I think that's really frightening because in the end...
I don't want, you know, robots coming on saying we're human and we have a soul.
They're already talking about AI having a soul, which is just very frightening to me.
Well, it's interesting because every sci-fi movie that we've ever seen, whether you watch the movie AI or Total Recall or The Matrix or whatever sci-fi movie you liked as a kid, it's all coming to be right now, right?
It really is all coming to be right now.
What was the purpose of the movie The Matrix?
The humans were the batteries for the digital world, in essence.
That's really what the movie was summed, if you just whittled it down.
That's what it was about.
And we are basically giving ourselves to this thing.
We may not be able to stop it.
And yes, I do think that the trans thing seems to be, and again, that's why they're going for the kids.
We're all going to age out, right?
I'm not that old, but we're all going to age out.
But if you can now break the reality of a whole generation of kids who are 5 to 12, and they will have no idea of what history was or what is real or literally.
That their body parts connotate something to their reality.
You're going to have major problems.
And I do think that is a huge problem.
One other thing on that, because it came up a couple times today.
I think one thing that could possibly be done a little bit with this is that we have this thing, this LGBT community.
And the T is the most anti-LGB thing on earth.
It is the most anti-gay movement that you could possibly have.
It really is.
Because in essence, what the trans community is saying is they're finding a five-year-old boy who happens to maybe be a little bit effeminate and he likes Star Wars and Transformers more than he likes Barbie, let's say.
And they're saying, you're actually not a boy.
You're a girl.
And maybe, and hopefully he would grow up, if not for this, to be a somewhat functional adult.
By the way, he might grow up to be a straight guy, too, because there are effeminate straight guys, and that's the gestalt of life.
But the same thing would go for a girl.
You might find a girl who's a little bit more of a tomboy, and they would now say, oh no, you're actually a boy.
So they are coming for absolutely everything.
But I would say to the, you know, that the gay community, and I hate the phrase community, should be fighting this probably on the forefront of this because it's them first.
And by the way, it's the feminists too.
I mean, it's the women that should be staying.
Yeah, when you watch a guy, you know, crush a woman in wrestling and then you applaud as a feminist, you may have to reevaluate the situation.
You know, you were talking about how new barriers are breaking down in this new environment and how new alliances are forming.
Barry Weiss and I talked about this same thing a couple of years ago.
She said before the Great Awakening, she said, if you would have ever said I would be on the same side as Rod Dreher about anything, I never would have believed it.
But here we are because we're both fighting the same therapeutic totalitarianism.
This is one of the things I learned from talking to interviewing people who...
They said that whenever you find allies, people who are courageous, you have to stand with them no matter what you disagree on.
This one woman, Camilla Bendevin, Prague, she and her husband were the only political conservatives and religious people at the top level of the Czech resistance.
She said, Rod, you mustn't imagine that other Christians had courage.
They didn't.
They kept their heads down like everybody else did.
My husband and I saw these hippies, Václav Havel and the others.
They didn't agree with us on a lot of things.
They had courage.
To stand up to totalitarianism.
And we knew they would be with us when the secret police came, and they knew they could count on us.
I think that courage of people like Brett Weinstein, Heather Hying, Peter Boghossian, and others, that is the glue that can keep us together, whether we're on the left or the right.
Yeah, well, look, there's something that does bridge the political divide, and that's truth, right?
I mean, that would probably be the great thing that drives that.
So some of those names you mentioned, these are lefties.
These are good friends of mine.
I mean, Brett, Barry, Peter.
I know Peter, I'm pretty sure he's going to move to Hungary any day now.
I mean, he has seen the promised land, as he has told me many times.
And he's an atheist still, which I think he's probably, he'll get out of that soon enough too.
But, you know, he's on the road, let's say.
but he believes in freedom.
But you have to find those people.
Since I mentioned Jordan earlier and he's coming here tomorrow, when we were on tour, one line, he would change the speech all the time, but he had a couple lines that would occasionally repeat.
He would ask the crowd, how many of you would think you would have been Nazis in 1933 Germany?
Now, nobody raises their hand, right?
Yes, I would have been a Nazi.
No, nobody raises their hand.
And then he would always respond the same way.
That means you probably would have been a Nazi.
Because these things don't just magically appear.
They appear by our acquiescence.
As I said earlier, they appear because we are not brave.
And we also don't have many models to be brave.
And I also think it's partly that was the real twisted message of of cancel culture.
And it's something that Trump really got right.
You know, when Trump always says they're not coming after me, they're coming after you.
I'm just standing in the way.
He really is right about that.
Tucker, they're not when they were always going to get rid of Tucker's advertisers.
It's not really that they fear Tucker that much.
It's that they figure he's a signal boost to everybody else to go, oh, I can say some things that aren't just the mainstream claptrap of the day.
And we just need more and more people to be brave.
And what advice would you give people who want to be brave?
Because I think you're a very good example.
I mean, you have been a progressive.
You left Young Turks, started your own YouTube channel.
So let's say...
He's fired.
What can he do?
Because I think it's really important, and you mentioned this, that if they're not brave enough, they will just trample us.
Let me just say something briefly about bravery, because people say this to me all the time, and I understand.
Like, I say what I think for a living.
Sometimes I think it's just kind of But when I was in Israel last week, the amount of people coming up to me and saying, Dave, you're so brave.
And I'm going, you literally were in Gaza.
Like, you have lived through things that I would never want to imagine.
So, you know, bravery, I would say, is a little bit on a spectrum.
But in a functioning, free society, unfortunately, I suppose it is brave to some extent.
I would say, know this.
Like, I can't give it to you in a Pollyannish sort of way.
Bad things will happen.
You will say what you think, and you know what?
Your wife or husband might be really pissed at you.
Your kids might turn on you.
You might be in trouble at work.
All sorts of things.
Actually, when I first was leaving the left, so to speak, and suddenly I was getting all this hate from the people that I thought were the purported tolerant ones and diverse ones and all that, and every day I would wake up and my email would be blowing up, like the worst unimaginable things, and Twitter and all that.
I actually developed an autoimmune disease in the middle of that.
I developed alopecia areata, which I'm sure some of you know of.
It's when you lose huge chunks of your hair.
Some people lose literally all their hair.
And I was just waking up with chunks of my hair just falling out every day.
I'd probably lost almost half.
It's all back now because I changed my stress habits and things like that.
But I mention that because you will go through some bad shit.
Pardon my French.
It is just the reality of it.
There is no way to sit here and say to you with a straight face, yes, go out there and say what you think about the world and it's just going to be great.
Like, it will not.
But what is the option?
And I guess that's the part that I don't have in me anymore.
I don't know what the option is.
I have to do it.
And I think it's probably the most important thing you can do as a human.
Can I prompt you to talk about your conversation with Peter Krakow on exactly that point?
Yeah, what John's talking about is when I was first here in the summer of 2021, I was a fellow at the Danube Institute, and I asked him, can you introduce me to someone from the anti-Orban opposition?
I just want to get a feel for why they oppose him.
So I was taken to meet this guy, Peter Krakow, who is a liberal and outspoken anti-Orban figure, but by all accounts, an honest man.
So he's a professor.
I sat down with him in his office and said, why are you against the government?
He said, well, I think it's corrupt, and plus I'm in favor of same-sex marriage.
This government is not.
But on the trans thing, I'm just not sure.
And then we went on to talk about other things.
At the end of the conversation, he said, but you know, in the end, I can stand here in my classroom in Budapest and say whatever I want about the government, and no one will bother me.
I said, Peter, that's really interesting because in the United States, you could say anything you wanted about anything and the government won't bother you.
But if you said what you did at first, that you're in favor of same-sex marriage but you're just not sure about trans, you'd probably have some students who would report you to trans.
So who has more freedom, Peter, you here in Orban's Hungary or your counterpart in America?
It just had not occurred to him, because he just didn't know that that's what it is.
And this is what I was talking about earlier, about Orban understanding that power is exercised not only by the state, but also informally by these institutions.
I wanted to say quickly, too, that I think this fear of suffering is the basis of this soft, therapeutic, brave new world totalitarianism we have.
We have created one or two generations of people who are terrified of suffering or even of anxiety, of relatively mild suffering.
When I interviewed people in Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Russia, About what's the most important lesson that Americans and others facing soft totalitarianism can take about how to resist.
They all said the most important one was develop a willingness and a capability to suffer for the truth.
Because they can hurt you, they can fire you, they can take away your liberty, they can do all of these things, but they cannot take away your integrity.
This is what Solzhenitsyn meant by saying, live not by lies.
He said, if you stand in the truth and are willing to suffer for it, ultimately the kingdom of lies will fall.
I don't know how many of you...
It was a Tom Hanks movie that more people should have seen with Halle Berry, Cloud Atlas.
Did many of you see that?
It is an absolutely wonderful sci-fi movie.
And the main line of the movie is, I will not be subjected to criminal abuse.
And we are all subjecting ourselves to criminal abuse constantly.
When we know that the truth is being assaulted and we just sit there and do nothing, we are giving it the oxygen to come for everything.
So, you know, the other part of this is at sort of the sci-fi level and the 1984 level, we may be far worse in some way.
The red pill is when you wake up to the world as it is.
The white pill is a very positive vision of the future.
Black pill would be the negative version of the future.
I try to be as much of a white pill guy as possible.
The black pill version of it would be that we are so deep within the technological march towards totalitarian control.
We're so deep in it already, we don't even know it.
And in essence, that would sort of be like Skynet has turned on from Terminator, something like that.
We might be there already, but what kind of person do you want to be if we're there already?
Do you want to be someone that just goes with it or do you want to be someone that stops it?
I think probably if you're here, you want to be somebody that stops it.
On that very point, in the last, I would say, six weeks, there have been a whole series of revelations about institutions like Hamilton 68, I think it is, and the organizations that were set up really in the last five or six years in the American government to control things.
and to deter expressions of points of view that were manifestly false, damaging, or whatever.
I think, for example, the first real adventure of that kind was the attempt by institutions of the government, the media, big tech, and so on, to argue that Trump was a Russian asset.
This was something that was said again and again and again.
It was believed, I think sincerely believed, by people in positions of authority and influence in the media.
People who resisted this were vilified.
They were themselves described as Russian assets and so on, or sometimes naive imitators of Russian propaganda.
You are yourself active against that in several ways, one of which was mentioned before, your support for a free enterprise, I'm sorry, not free enterprise, but a free internet and media.
I wonder if you'd want to tell us how serious this black pill version of events now seems.
The thing is, we don't know, because Google, again, we are all walking around with either an iPhone or an Android device in our pocket right now.
Is that thing tracking you everywhere you go?
Probably.
Is that thing listening to you?
At all times, probably.
How many times have you been...
Like these things happen.
You're talking about something privately with a friend and next thing you know you get an ad for that thing on Instagram.
These things are just happening, right?
You get phantom buzzes in your pocket, like the litany of weird things, and yet no one's putting the phone down.
I try not to be on social media on the weekends, and for six years in a row, actually, I've done Off the Grid August, where I have no phone, no computer, no news, no TV for a month.
It's actually one of the things that I think, for somebody that does politics on a daily basis, which makes everybody crazy, I think it's one of the things that's kept me roughly sane, ballpark sane, let's say, over these last couple years.
The black pill version is that they've sort of got us already and there's no way out.
I don't fundamentally believe that because as long as long, look, the human spirit, humans have been through genocides and humans have been through world wars and holocausts and the endless history of the world, which is unbelievable.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
And actually, if you look at the world right now, a couple things notwithstanding, it's fairly peaceful right now.
unidentified
We're in sort of an information war, but we don't have massive genocides across the world right now.
That's not really the default behavior of humans.
So things are relatively good to some extent, but we just have to figure out what our relationship will be with that digital world, because otherwise we will just be the batteries for it.
You know, you said that you've been to Israel, you're in Hungary, trying to figure out what you can take back to America that can help us with the American struggles we're dealing with.
I think that the Israelis and the Hungarians have something we don't, and that is they have a more or less homogeneous ethnicity, ethnos.
Hungary is mostly Hungarian.
Israel is mostly Jewish.
You know, they share ethnicity and they share religion.
We don't have that in America, and it's by design.
And that's why you can't just plug and play Hungary to America.
Another thing that both countries have is they're small, and they faced, for their entire existence, threats to their very existence.
And so they've had to learn the hard way, limits.
We in the United States don't even understand what limits are.
And so just this week I read that there was a report from the Government Accounting Office saying that the U.S. Navy can't deploy ships.
We're falling far behind in deploying ships.
But the U.S. Navy sure can find time to create an official drag queen digital ambassador, right?
You tell that to Hungarians and they look at you like, oh, come on.
I'm like, no, no, no.
It's real.
happening.
So I guess what I would ask you, Dave, is how Yeah, well, first off, in my limited time, I'm only here for another day and a half, but this is exactly what I want to find out more about from the Hungarian perspective, because I really did find it out from the Israelis' perspective, and I think you're right about that.
And I also think, you know, in their case specifically, although Hungary's had external problems, Their external problems have been so nonstop for the entire existence that it whittled a piece of coal into a diamond, in essence.
But I'll tell you something that I learned there that was really interesting.
So they're in the midst of this judicial reform situation right now, and without getting too far into it, basically the right believes that the judiciary there has too much legislative power.
The left feels that if they give up that power, that ultimately it will give the religious people too much power over their lives.
So it really is a battle of secular versus religious there.
I really went out of my way, just like you talked to that professor.
I thought, I want to talk to people on both sides.
It's very easy for me to talk to people on the right, but I really want to talk to people on the left on this.
And I sat down with a girl yesterday, and we had coffee in Tel Aviv, and she's a full leftist there.
And she told me something that was really amazing.
Well, first, she didn't tell it, and she didn't say it specifically, but it became obvious as we were talking.
She kept talking about how much she loved the country.
And she said that, you know, at all these protests, the anti-reform protests, there are Israeli flags everywhere, and they're talking about the history of the country, and the founding of the country, and the importance of the country, and the historical significance, and all of these things.
And I thought, now that's something, because this is very different than the left in America.
So in America, it's just, don't take Take my word for it.
Take AOC's word for it.
Take Ilhan Omar's word for it.
Take Kamala Harris's word for it.
Take virtually any mainstream Democrats' word for it.
They will tell you that the founding of America was flawed.
It was based in slavery.
It was based in racism.
It was based in the patriarchy and misogyny and all of these things.
So when the left is out there protesting and when they're burning down cities and BLM and Antifa and all these things – We're just trying to fix a few of these things.
They're literally out there saying we are trying to upend America.
I thought that's a really interesting difference.
It sounds to me like that's also the difference that you may have here because if that professor represents anything of your left, that's the left that you want to strengthen.
You might ultimately, everyone in this room might have differences ultimately on certain policies when it comes to your left here.
But if they're not bananas, If they're not out of control like our left is in America, you really do want to strengthen them if you want to live in a free society.
Now, it will be tricky because you will be frustrated with them all the time, right?
Because you're going to want them to come to your side, so to speak.
But if in America we had a somewhat sane left right now and we were just arguing, instead of arguing whether America is fundamentally decent, we were arguing about marginal tax rates and we were arguing about immigration.
Well, that's what a Western society can do and can flourish by doing.
That's what human communication is all about.
I think that's a fundamental difference, and that's also why identity politics is so dangerous.
Diversity is not our strength.
It's a nice piece of something sometimes, but it's not a strength in and of itself.
So when they've gone out of their way to, say, America, which has taken in all of these people from everywhere, that you must focus on your identity, which was more important in the place that you fled than the place that you came to, it is designed, it is a bomb in the system designed to destroy the system, and that's what we have to watch out for.
I think what Prime Minister Orban actually said, that big countries have the luxury to be stupid, while small countries don't have that because we will get destroyed.
And I think that's what is the case.
Although I'm not sure that our left is actually much better than your left, because they are getting indoctrinated with all the crazy stuff coming from America.
But I had a similar experience, let's say, in Estonia.
They also, they know how to, you know, they have to survive a very small nation, and I think Israel is a bit the same in this sense.
I only have one last question before we open up it for the audience.
Kind of have been beating around the bush around this topic.
I mean, you mentioned, for example, the Don't Say Gay bill.
And, of course, the progressive media in America, but even here in Hungary a lot of people think...
So my really question here is, do you think that Ron DeSantis is taking cues from Orban, or somebody who is working close together with him?
Oh, I actually thought you were going to ask me something else, which I may as well address.
I happen to be gay.
I don't know if any of you know that or care or anything else.
I'm married.
I've been with my partner for like 15 years.
We've been married for...
As long as you don't want to go into schools and dress as a drag queen and say to kids that it's fine, we're okay.
Yeah, this is about as crazy as I dress.
We have two kids.
I think the gay thing happens to be probably the least interesting thing about me.
I'm not here to tell anyone.
I don't think being gay is inherently good or bad.
I think it's part of the human condition, and it's part of the...
Penguins and everything else.
But, you know, Jordan talks about this a lot.
You know, every society should sort of have an ideal model that you'd be striving towards, right?
So the ideal model that everyone should be striving towards, and this is where certain little words could be a little tricky here, so bear with me.
The ideal model that we know that works for societies, obviously, is a father and a mother and children beneath that and grandparents above that.
And that's how you sort of model things out and build a bottom-up society.
And that's how families flourish.
We know this.
But that doesn't mean it has to be the only thing.
And I think what you would want to do in a free society is say, oh, there are people who are a little bit different, and what are the margin cases that we can do something with when people want to live full, flourishing lives?
Do you want to push these people all the way to the margins?
And basically push them out of society and then God knows what happens to them there and what they will then push back on you.
Or do you want to have a society that can say, here's sort of the standard, right?
Here's the standard.
And then there is room for other people around that.
So that's just to address that, which I think is important to address, by the way, because even when I tweeted out that I was coming here, everyone said, they're going to come get you.
And I was like, I don't know.
We'll see.
But so far, everyone's been quite nice.
But I've only been with you guys.
Was your question whether Ron DeSantis is...
let's put it that way.
But it seems clear to me, even from this conversation that we're having here, that the wise Westerners The same problems that you guys are seeing from a Hungarian perspective are the things that we're seeing from an American perspective.
They're almost exactly the same.
They're not exactly the same, right?
Like, you guys have different problems with immigration.
Then we have our immigration problem, by the way, in the last three days or something.
It's like, it's exploding.
Absolutely.
We're doing exactly what Europe did seven years ago.
We are just letting everybody in right now.
And then it's like, we'll end up where Germany's at right now.
And, you know, hopefully not.
It seems like it could all head in that direction.
So I don't know specifically.
I don't know that they're talking about this sort of stuff.
But I sense it's fairly obvious.
If you are a functioning, decent person, there are obvious problems right now.
And there are some solutions that are going to be tricky and have some pain associated with them.
And the media will treat you horribly.
But as DeSantis says all the time, the more the media attacks him, the more he knows he's doing the right thing.
I suspect that's what's going on here as well.
Could I just now say that there are four people on the platform.
We do disagree about certain things, but there's probably a general commonality of outlook and interest.
Is there anyone in the audience here today who so far would like to ask a question because they disagree strongly with something that seems to be...
I'm sorry?
Oh, they disagree with...
Is there anybody who would like to raise a hand on that?
Yes, Lee.
It's not as much a disagreement as something that Dave said that gave me pause.
And that was, he mentioned sort of the age of our American politicians.
Now, Viktor Orban is a babe in the woods compared to our politicians.
And Rishi Sunak is even in the womb compared to our politicians.
And likewise, Emmanuel Macron.
But what you said was that they're defending a world that no longer exists or something.
But my question is, if indeed that is true, then why are they so easily pulled along into these radical, woke things?
Why aren't they standing their ground for the wisdom of former times?
I think I can answer it most easily in the case of Joe Biden, where he obviously has severe cognitive problems.
We all know it.
Everyone knows it.
Every speech where he can't say two words, literally two words in a row without stammering.
He shakes hands with the air.
He walks off in the wrong direction.
On Easter Sunday, did you see that last year?
On Easter Sunday where they literally sent the Easter Bunny to go talk to him, to move him away from people in the crowd.
It's so out of control there.
So he is no longer the person.
He's in the body of Joe Biden, but he's not...
cognitively there enough, which is, which, yeah, no.
So some of them are so, right.
Okay.
So on the case of those people, I think this is where you've got to give the devil his due.
I think the left has done something amazing, and we all may hate it.
We may hate what the left has done to all of our societies, but you have got to give them credit.
They have destroyed so much so quickly, and they have taken so many people and twisted them into saying things that they never would have said, you know, 5, 10, 20 years ago.
If you took Nancy Pelosi— Chuck Schumer 20 years ago?
These were not crazy radical leftists, but they decided to let the inmates run the asylum.
I would say it's a flaw.
It's a character flaw, probably.
It's a flaw probably in belief, and it's a flaw that politics just kind of breaks people.
Do you think they saw the approval and validation that AOC was getting on Twitter and thought, we better get on board with this?
Yeah, I think in the case of Nancy Pelosi specifically, she saw these young girls come in, and the media loved them, and there's probably some, we could probably get some biblical story if someone can figure it out, the older woman who wanted to steal all the power from the younger women, something like that, and she wanted that, she wanted to just be part of that, and clearly it didn't end well for her, and the question is, how much of America will take with it?
And I think in the question of the right, the normally Republicans, the older Republicans, We're terrified of the donor class, terrified of the woke capitalists who are very much on the left socially and really only care about keeping their tax breaks.
And I think that the older Republicans just don't know how to resist business.
Asa Hutchinson, who's governor of Arkansas, running for president now, you know, he is one of these people Dave was talking about, one of these Normie Republicans who tuts Tucker and Ron DeSantis for...
I mean, that's so of another generation, but they don't know what time it is, to use a Claremont Institute phrase.
Next question.
A gentleman here, and then later.
Hello, Dave.
So nice to see you here in Hungary.
I have a provocative question for you, which is regarding the 2024 presidential elections.
Is there a possibility that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, we will see Trump who will shout his things towards President Biden and people will vote for Biden because the American voters will see an angry orange man and not a reasonable and successful governor like DeSantis?
I think I missed a part in the middle.
So is the question if Trump becomes president?
So if Trump gets the Republican nomination by the RNC, is there a chance that the same thing will happen in 2024 during the presidential debate between Biden and Trump, that the people will see that orange man is bad and we will vote for Biden because...
I mean, I think there's very little chance that Trump becomes president.
I think there's a numbers problem.
There's a reality problem.
Look, Trump got 70...
If we're to believe the last election was legit, so that's a whole other conversation, but if we're basically to believe that, The question, just on a numbers level, is where is a new Trump voter?
Who is the person that finally now is like, yes, now I get it, I'm voting for Trump?
It really doesn't exist.
Now, you could argue that there'd be a lot less Trump voters.
People are tired of the craziness.
A lot of the attacks on DeSantis in the last month, they just have not worked.
It's partly because it's so patently not true.
When Trump goes out there and says Florida's horrible and all of these things, it's like, or DeSantis is a globalist and a rhino.
It's like, this is not working.
If he is a globalist and a rhino, then we're all globalists and rhinos.
The guy doing everything we all are asking for, doing it in the more efficient way than we could have ever imagined, and Trump's going after him.
So Trump has a problem in that I don't know where the new Trump voter is.
DeSantis doesn't have that problem.
DeSantis, it's fairly obvious.
He can get all the guys that you're talking about.
I can't wait for DeSantis to be the nominee so I can look Brett Weinstein in the eye and Pete Boghossian and all of my Democrat friends and say, so are you going to vote for him?
Yes or no?
Because do you believe in anything that you have?
I've tried this with them many times.
He's the guy that can bring over the crossover people, which is why he just won in a huge landslide.
I think Trump also has a problem, which is that if he genuinely believes that the election was stolen, which I believe him on his word that he does, well then how does it make sense you're running again if you haven't done anything to solve the problem related to that in terms of ballot harvesting and everything else?
We just don't know where they are.
And if you believe the thing you're telling us you believe, they're going to just do it to you again.
So to me, that's a recipe for Biden, too, if Biden even makes it that far.
Thank you.
gentleman here.
I was a second.
Thank you.
Okay, so recently in the last few years I really got disillusioned by the idea to divide people by the left and the right ideologies.
I think it's much more clear if we look at each other on exactly what do we think on certain issues.
And you are looking for solutions to have.
Platforms for free speech to go around all these shenanigans which the US government did, maybe through Twitter or the shadow banning, all these things.
Don't you think if the demolishment of this I am left, I am right thing changes and we more look at what we really think and discuss on that basis and we don't divide ourselves?
Based on left and right.
For example, I agree with you on most of the things we spoke today.
Migration and this trans ideology craziness.
But still, I oppose our government on many things.
But still, most of the things we agree on.
So why do we have to put ourselves on a different side of a division?
It's probably a good question for everybody up here.
I would say briefly, and I used to talk about this a lot, sort of how the labels don't fit anymore, and I think instead of left and right, you could basically say authoritarian or libertarian.
Do you believe in sort of centralized control or do you believe in individual autonomy?
Because then you're not sort of attaching that to all of the political, you know, the policy prescriptions, all of those things.
I think the real reason that we sort of do this So it's just somewhat of a way, otherwise we would get lost in every little thing.
What do you mean by left?
Also, again, having just come from Israel, Israel has a more socialist system, right?
They have a more left system because they have socialized healthcare.
the country started with kibbutzes.
So these were communal thing, you know, community organizations that nobody owned that all worked for together.
That might really work on micro levels, So a lot of the definitions don't quite work.
For me, it's usually just shorthand.
But trust me, when I hear that you have some level of a somewhat sane left here, that's very happy to hear.
Because, of course, not everybody is that far gone.
I think the question is, can you strengthen those people enough to stop the worst parts of it?
I think that a great Hungarian-American, John Lukasz.
He said it very well some years ago.
He said the future is going to be between people who believe that they want to live under the machine and people who want to live as human beings.
And I think you can find people who would identify on the political left or right who take both sides there.
The guys we were talking about, Peter Boghossi and these others, they're in the American left-wing tradition.
Peter, when he came here to Budapest a year ago, he had written to me, by the way, a few months earlier.
We didn't know each other, but he said, listen, I've been offered a fellowship at MCC, Matthias Corvinus Collegium here, and I'm an atheist.
I'm on the left.
I don't know.
I hear that Hungary is really conservative.
I said, Peter, I think you should take it because you're coming from Superwoke West Coast University.
If you come here, you'll find that it's generally on the right at this school.
But the thing that's going to hit you most of all is it's possible to have a real conversation there.
People there are interested in what you have to say and in dialoguing with you.
Nobody's going to try to cancel you or run you down.
That's what we used to have in America and we don't anymore.
They still have it in Hungary.
Well, I came here back for a second time at Danube a month after Peter had arrived.
And as Dave said, Peter came up to me and it was like he had found the promised land.
He could not believe how good it was here.
And to me, that is a testimony to how bad things have gotten crazy in America.
And eventually his woke university drove him out, even though he is a left-wing atheist.
Because they have this machine-like view of how society should be organized, it must be shoved into this ideological form.
And they don't want to give people the chance to be messy and human.
Because I think that this comes up a lot, obviously.
We're in a period of political realignment.
That's the truth of the matter.
But I have to...
And the reason is this, that there are people who believe in a freer economy or a more regulated one.
There are people who believe in a more conventional culture and a more bohemian one.
The people who believe, oddly enough, in bohemian culture tend themselves To prefer not freer economies but more regulated ones.
The people who believe in free economies tend to prefer a more solid culture.
I can give you a good theoretical reason for that.
Free economic societies need morally upright people to make sure they go effectively.
The compromise that you, for example, feel you have to make at the moment is somewhat less serious than you may think.
Here's the reason.
That however, if you are, for example, a believer in a free economy and a strong culture, however much a conservative party, like the Tory party in England, Imitates the left economically and becomes more restrictive.
It's never going to be as restrictive as the Labour Party.
So you're always going to have a reason for voting for the right, even when you disapprove of its economic policies.
And the same is true for culture.
So at the end of the day, the left-right thing makes sense over the long term, but not all the time.
There are periods when it goes into flux.
And it takes time to settle down to the new opinions that have erupted, I think.
But, John, can I just push back on that a little bit?
That's changing in the United States now.
There was a piece in Politico, maybe a left magazine, saying that Tucker Carlson's economic populism is breaking the brains of the left.
And you're seeing now emerge, I mean, Gladden Pappin, who's here with us, he's an American conservative intellectual who is pushing for what would be considered, I think it's fair to say, a more left-wing version of economics.
But he's coming at it from the right because he believes correctly that the most important thing for any government to do is to protect the family.
And there's no doubt about that.
which means that a lot of people on the right are disturbed by the anti-free speech attitude on the one hand, the support for transgender policies of an extreme kind imposed by the threat of firing, dismissal.
These things strike most conservatives.
Who are also free marketeers as outrageous.
And I think that's, as I say, we're in a period of realignment.
I think you can also see that.
I mean, I think the clearest example from an American perspective is look at Tucker's position on the Russia-Ukraine war.
He's the most sort of isolationist or what he would call America first, you know, get out of this war.
This is going to end up in World War III.
That used to be the position of the left, right?
The left was the anti-war party.
Bernie Sanders, you would think, would be leading the charge against World War III.
But he's voting for all of the money that we are sending over there and all of the arms and everything else.
And this is a whole other topic, but in essence, we are now bankrolling this massive war that – We have no congressional authorization for it or anything else.
But the point is that that's a very fundamental flip on what someone might traditionally say left and right.
Wait a minute.
I thought the left is the peace people, and it's those scary conservatives who want war.
This panel is divided on that, by the way.
There's no doubt about that.
I'm not even commenting on that specifically.
It's divided two or three to one, but it's divided.
No, but think about it.
Now that they've gotten rid of Tucker, and maybe Rupert Murdoch having had two conversations by phone with Zelensky in March might have had something to do with that, but Tucker's gone.
Name a single major media figure in the United States who is critical of the U.S. government policy on the war.
It's hard to do.
No, they're actually cheering it.
I mean, again, turn on MSNBC.
That is the lefty MSNBC.
All of the cheerleaders are there.
And on the major mainstream figures on the right, most of them are for the war.
I don't want to debate the morality of the war, but you would think that in a country as big as the United States...
It's a uniparty.
Here in Orbán's Hungary, and Orbán is against NATO policy in the war, it's easier to find anti-government commentary in the media than it is in the United States.
What does that tell you?
Probably everything you need to know.
And that's, again, why our mainstream media...
That is why my biggest criticism right now of Trump is that he will just keep it going.
If you want this craziness to continue with the media, then the guy you want is Trump because he is the guy who cares about ratings.
He cares about who's talking about him and all of those things.
He will continually feed it.
Again, this is sort of like people look at this thing as like a little nothing.
But DeSantis starting to say to these people, I will no longer talk to you.
You do not do the job you were set out to do.
That is the way out of this.
And yeah, I wish we had more anti-war people in America.
Again, regardless of fully debating all the specifics about the war.
I just wish we had less of a uniparty on war, on economics, on any number of things.
This is what the real value of Tucker Carlson was.
He would have people on his show that you wouldn't see anywhere else on the media.
People from the left he would have on because he found them interesting and thought they had something important to say.
And he's gone now.
That's gone.
Well, look, we have the infrastructure to free him, right?
I would say Rumble is the number one.
If you want Tucker out there saying whatever he wants to say on an uncancellable platform and making plenty of money while he's doing it, that to me is the place to go.
It might end up that Elon might just sit down with him and say, let's do this thing together.
There are options, but yes, it will not come from the mainstream media.
I will say, by the way, that for 40 years, conservatives have been lucky to have had Rupert Murdoch in charge of newspapers and media, because without him, it would have been completely dominant.
You're right about that.
No, I know you're not attacking him, old boy.
Look, but if you want to have a media which is diverse, the only way to have it is to have one that is run by proprietors because they're plural.
There are more than one of them.
And if you have that, then in the long run, you're going to have every now and then...
a media boss who does things you don't like.
But if you believe in the plural ownership of the media, then I think you want independent...
Now, I have to stop at that point and say we have time.
We're beginning to think we may need to turn the alarm on to get you to leave.
The test worked, I thought.
So let me say that we're going to take one more question and I think we're going to direct it to our guest.
Dave Rubin, and then we go from there.
Well, now there are a hundred questions, hands being raised.
This gentleman...
Thank you.
So, progressive people in power and billionaires use their time and energy to progress their political agenda.
While conservatives don't do it as much because they're busy going on with their lives or pursue non-controversial initiatives.
So how could we encourage conservative billionaires and people in power to use their resources to advance a return to normality?
Or should we even do that?
Well, it would be nice if more of them got involved, for sure, right?
I think sometimes, you know, you're right.
I think I addressed this a little bit at the beginning of my talk.
You know, conserve, again, this sort of wide conserve net.
You're out there just kind of living your life and worried about your family and what you want on this planet and all of those things.
Politics doesn't become this religious, cult-like mission to dominate everything.
You accept that there are people that are different than you.
You want to agree to disagree, hopefully.
We could probably use more billionaires in play.
Peter Thiel, obviously, was very big in Trump's first run.
He's now announced he's not going to be involved at all in the next election.
I don't think the answer, though, is ultimately that if we get bankrolled by enough billionaires, that ultimately that will solve all of the problems.
I really do believe if we build enough of a decentralized internet, If we figure out enough ways to have commerce outside of the system, to not have the World Economic Forum push all of their truly psychotic lunacy on us, and if we start ignoring a lot of what these people are pushing on us, whether it's climate or trans stuff or some of the other issues that we've mentioned here, That's probably the best way to do it.
But yeah, a couple more billionaires probably wouldn't hurt either.
I would say too that we need to have fewer billionaires, conservative billionaires, throwing their money behind the Republican Party and more of them putting their money behind cultural projects, building new media, building new colleges like the University of Austin instead of like, who was the hedge fund guy who just gave $300 million to Harvard?
Was it Mercer?
Yeah, it was one of those.
But that's insane.
Politics is important, but it's not going to solve everything.
We need to give money to politics, but also meaningful cultural initiatives, because the left owns all the culture.
And as long as the left owns the culture, it's going to be much harder for us to compete.
If I could just say one last thing briefly, I just want to say how absolutely refreshing this has been.
America's become deeply unserious.
It's really unfortunate, and it's why, again, why I think DeSantis is It's kind of the right way out of this, but putting politics aside, just to sit in a room with people, audience, and colleagues that are trying to figure a way out of this thing.
And clearly something's working here.
That really was the purpose of my whole mission of doing this trip, and we're going to do many more like this.
So I just want to thank you guys, because this has been an absolute pleasure.
Well, you've already stolen my thunder by giving the applause before I asked for it.
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