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All right, people, using the latest in technology, we are live on the electronic computer machine. | ||
I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
This is The Rubin Report, and it's Friday, so we've got another roundtable extravaganza for you. | ||
Joining me today is a columnist for The New York Post and Fox News, Carol Markowitz, and the politics editor at Chronicles Magazine and a Substack essayist for Contra, Pedro Gonzalez. | ||
Carol, Pedro, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
Hi, thanks for having us. | ||
It's good to be here. | ||
Pedro, this is your tryout, first time Rubin Report person | ||
and it's all dependent, your entire career is dependent on the next half hour, are you ready? | ||
I look forward to disappointing you like I disappoint my mother. | ||
And Carol never disappoints anybody, so let's just dive right into it. | ||
The big sort of cultural story of the week was that Elon Musk went after Palpatine-like George Soros in an interview on CNBC after the Tesla shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, and then he continued it on Twitter. | ||
Here's a bit How do you make a choice? | ||
I mean, in terms of when you're going to engage? | ||
George Soros, somehow you're automatically an anti-Semite or something like that. | ||
Here we go. | ||
unidentified
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How do you make a choice? | |
You don't see, I mean, in terms of when you're going to engage. | ||
I mean, for example, even today, Elon, you tweeted this thing about George Soros. | ||
I'm looking for it because I want to make sure I quote it properly. | ||
But, I mean, you know what you wrote, but you basically... I said it reminds me of Magneto's. | ||
It's like, you know, calm down, people. | ||
This is not, like, made up to make a better case out of it. | ||
You also... You said he wants to erode the very fabric of civilization and Soros hates humanity. | ||
Like, when you do something like that, do you think about... Yeah, I think that's true. | ||
That's my opinion. | ||
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Okay, but why share it? | |
Why share it? | ||
Especially because... I mean... | ||
Why share it when people who buy Teslas may not agree with you? | ||
Advertisers on Twitter may not agree with you? | ||
Why not just say, hey, I think this? | ||
You can tell me, we can talk about it over there, you can tell your friends, but why share it widely? | ||
I mean, this is freedom of speech. | ||
I'm allowed to say what I want to say. | ||
You absolutely are, but I'm trying to understand why you do, because you have to know it's got a... It puts you in the middle of the partisan divide in the country. | ||
It makes you a lightning rod for criticism. | ||
I mean, do you like that? | ||
You know, people today are saying he's an anti-Semite. | ||
I don't think you are. | ||
No, I'm definitely not. | ||
I'm like a pro-Semite, if anything. | ||
I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it. | ||
I have to say, you know, Elon had a bit of a weird week because he did hire this CEO from NBCUniversal who seems like she might be kind of woke. | ||
And I keep trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. | ||
But so let's put that one aside for a second. | ||
But his answer there. | ||
Yeah, I think it's true. | ||
And that's my opinion. | ||
And the interviewer just does not want him to share his opinion. | ||
He even says it. | ||
Why share it? | ||
Pedro, it's crazy that people share their opinions in America in 2023, isn't it? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Yeah, and I think there's this kind of debate over, does Soros wake up every morning and do this kind of self-affirmation like, I will destabilize democracy. | ||
I think that that debate is not really useful because we can actually just look at what he does and what he accomplishes with his money and his influence. | ||
And so specifically the issue of Soros-backed prosecutors, district attorneys, right? | ||
So there are about 75 of these people in the United States. | ||
Now that sounds like a small number, but it's actually extremely consequential because those 75 people represent one in every five Americans, or over 70 million people across half of the 50 most populous cities in the country. | ||
Because these district attorneys, their jurisdictions are either counties or groups of counties, right? | ||
So with all of that under consideration, you're talking about a group of people who oversees 40% of homicides in this country. | ||
And so we can actually evaluate whether or not Soros is a good or bad guy when we look at these prosecutors and we see that they're doing things like not prosecuting violent offenders, letting people go, implementing these trial policies and these plea deals and these basically allowing people to get off for violent crimes with a kind of slap on the wrist. | ||
We don't have to guess whether or not Soros is actually a bad guy. | ||
We can just look at what he's doing. | ||
I mean, think of, obviously everyone is familiar with Alvin Bragg right now, but think about Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, a guy who oversaw a historic murder wave. | ||
And there's been this attempt to impeach him, but so far it's been unsuccessful. | ||
Like these people are deeply entrenched and they're only there because of Soros and his money. | ||
Right, and also we could mention George Gascon, who was the DA in San Francisco, who now, who wrecked San Francisco, now is wrecking LA as the DA, and the guy that they impeached, or they got rid of, recalled, Chesa Bodine in San Francisco. | ||
Carol, this notion that somehow if you criticize Soros, you're an anti-Semite, is so patently ridiculous. | ||
That would be like saying if you criticize Dave Chappelle, you're anti-black, or if you criticize Anderson Cooper, you're anti-gay. | ||
Actually, we have a tweet here from Amahai Chickly. | ||
He's in Israel's government. | ||
He wrote, "As Israel's minister who's entrusted on combating anti-Semitism, I would like to | ||
clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon | ||
Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and role model. | ||
Criticism of Soros, who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people | ||
in the state of Israel, is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite." | ||
So, meanwhile, you've got an Israeli minister who this is his gig to make sure that people | ||
He's on the side of Elon Musk, but our entire leftist media machine is now calling Elon Musk an anti-Semite. | ||
That's it. | ||
First of all, I love Israelis. | ||
I love that, like, we love Elon, leave Elon alone. | ||
Just perfect. | ||
You know, it's interesting because Soros isn't like doing this in the shadows. | ||
He had a Wall Street Journal piece about a year ago, last July, saying, hey, I fund these prosecutors, and here's why. | ||
So this isn't like a conspiracy theory. | ||
He admits to this, and he has his reasons for it. | ||
And I think it's OK to criticize him and his reasons. | ||
And the thing that Elon is saying, that he's being destructive to civilization, this is true. | ||
We see this in the news. | ||
We watch this happen all the time. | ||
Tying it to Soros is showing, look, this is where the funding for these bad ideas comes from. | ||
And the fact that he's Jewish is such a side issue. | ||
Like, when does he ever talk about his Judaism? | ||
I mean, it's like, literally, I don't even associate him with Judaism at all. | ||
And if we can't criticize Jews, I don't know. | ||
I don't think anybody should be criticizing me or you because obviously that's antisemitic. | ||
Obviously. | ||
To reiterate Pedro's point on that, here's what I tweeted out. | ||
The simplest way to look at it, meaning this whole situation, is what DAs he's financially backed and what they subsequently did to Democrat-run cities. | ||
It's one thing to be a misguided 20-year-old with good intentions. | ||
It's another to be his age with his track record and supposedly have them too. | ||
Point is, there is no legit rationale for his actions unless you want to upend Western democracies, which he's doing quite well. | ||
Look at his track record. | ||
And then I link to a Daily Mail piece over there that has some of the numbers that you referenced, Pedro. | ||
Is there any version of Soros that we're not giving credit to? | ||
Is he just misguided? | ||
I hear a lot of people say, well, his intentions are good. | ||
He doesn't want people to rot in jail. | ||
So he sends them out onto the street. | ||
Right. | ||
He foists rapists and murderers on us out of the kindness of his heart. | ||
I actually, again, I can't read his mind. | ||
And there are other billionaires like him. | ||
There are other philanthropists with quotation marks around that word that are doing this. | ||
But Soros is just the most notorious. | ||
And I think it's because he's also probably the most prolific in the sense. | ||
It's become like his elemental purpose to do this. | ||
But it's not just crime, obviously. | ||
It's also immigration. | ||
He uses money to basically hack political systems and bypass the rule of law. | ||
That's why the countries like Hungary have passed Stop Soros laws, which are essentially intended to stop his money from being used to facilitate mass immigration. | ||
Because again, that's a violation of a country's sovereignty. | ||
And for the record, he was born in Hungary. | ||
That's right. | ||
Yeah, that's right. | ||
No, I mean, you have a guy who, again, we can evaluate what he's actually doing, independent of the rhetoric, using words like democracy and openness and things like that. | ||
What does Soros actually accomplish? | ||
He makes our quality of life worse. | ||
He gets people killed. | ||
He makes the United States a place where crime has become the norm and where we're not even allowed to comment on it anymore because it's considered a kind of anti-Semitism just by the fact that he's Jewish. | ||
Carol, one last thought on this, just bringing it back to Elon for a second. | ||
Doesn't it strike you as just deeply refreshing that not only is he willing to do these interviews, but the way he answers the questions, where you can see he's thinking it through in real time, he's saying, hey, this is my opinion, and the fact that the interviewer, I don't even know his name, it doesn't even matter, that he's so on the side of people self-censoring, which is probably the biggest problem that we have in America right now. | ||
Yeah, that interviewer would have no problem if Elon Musk was selling the opposite idea, that we should defend George Soros, that criticizing George Soros is anti-Semitic. | ||
That interviewer will be cheering him on and talking about how he's talking truth to power, but instead he's trying to shut down Elon's point of view. | ||
And Elon catches that. | ||
I really have a soft spot for him. | ||
Also, sidebar, but his new CEO follows me on Twitter, so how bad could she be? | ||
Oh, right. | ||
You were on the list when it came out that she might be a kind of woke lefty. | ||
You were on the list of people that she followed. | ||
So people were kind of like, oh, she may not be that bad. | ||
And we'll see. | ||
We'll see. | ||
I love Elon. | ||
I think that what he's doing is really refreshing. | ||
And I love seeing somebody just say what they think and not have to clear it with their PR team. | ||
So the other big story this week, obviously, was the Durham report coming out. | ||
Let's just dive into it real quick, Daily Wire. | ||
Special Counsel John Durham, who was tasked by former Attorney General Bill Barr to examine the propriety of the FBI's investigation of President Trump, released a 320-page report on Monday that found the FBI had no evidence to support a Trump-Russia scandal when it began its investigation and found sobering differences in how it approached the Trump probe compared to other politically sensitive investigations. | ||
Pedro, am I some sort of genius or person from the future in that I never fell for this thing and people could go back to all of my videos for the past six years and never find me buying what obviously was completely nonsensical? | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, and honestly, it's interesting because this this should be something that is like really sort of shocking, but it's not for exactly that reason. | ||
It's like this is not really news. | ||
And I think that's why there was there was this. | ||
I think the maybe again, I didn't see all of it, but that's the impression I got from the reaction to it was it was just kind of people, you know, sighing that like, yeah, we knew that. | ||
But I guess that the reason I haven't really gotten kind of You know, and I'm upset about it, I guess, is because I don't want to just get angry about this, about this attempt by the deep state to do whatever. | ||
I actually want accountability. | ||
And I think there's a problem now, and this is kind of an outsider take on this issue, but the problem on the right is that we, I think we like just getting really angry about things and then never holding anybody accountable or getting serious enough to hold people accountable. | ||
And that's kind of where I'm at. | ||
It's like, yes, of course they did this. | ||
Of course it was wrong. | ||
And unethical and horrible, but now what? | ||
I don't wanna just get angry about it. | ||
Yeah, is that really the issue? | ||
I mean, I say that on the show all the time. | ||
We can have hearings about everything. | ||
We can expose Twitter files, all of the stuff, always. | ||
We can all turn out to be right three years later after being called conspiracy theorists. | ||
But to Pedro's point, nothing happens. | ||
I mean, that's what I kept thinking all week. | ||
All right, congratulations. | ||
We got the info that we thought. | ||
Nobody's gonna get fired, doesn't matter. | ||
You know, I'm not going to wait for big structural changes. | ||
I would love to see, obviously, accountability on a bigger level. | ||
But on a smaller level, I want everybody who fell for these hoaxes, every time they say anything, I want us to say, you thought Donald Trump was a Russian spy. | ||
So, just disqualify all of their future opinions. | ||
That's what they do to us. | ||
That's why Media Matters exists. | ||
They catch us saying something that's wrong or inappropriate or whatever, and then they use that line to disqualify everything that we say going forward. | ||
I don't see why we don't do that to them. | ||
Have the list of people who said absolutely insane things about Donald Trump's connection to Russia, and hold them accountable like that for the rest of their lives. | ||
So the other thing that happened this week, and it's sort of related to that, is there was a congressional hearing on the weaponization of government, and a couple FBI whistleblowers have come out. | ||
And what we're gonna play for you right now is unbelievably extraordinary. | ||
And again, the question is, will anything happen? | ||
Basically a whistleblower saying, yeah, we can't release all those tapes that Tucker got, because we were pretty much in on it. | ||
Take a look. | ||
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Those individuals were inside the Capitol, to which the SSA responded back. | |
And I was privy to these conversations firsthand. | ||
Why can't you show us? | ||
Why can't you just send us, give us access to the 11,000 hours of video that's available? | ||
Because there may be, maybe, U.C.' | ||
's undercover officers or C.H.S.' 's confidential human form, confidential human sources on those videos whose identity we need to protect. | ||
Oh, hot damn, it turns out there were a whole bunch of undercover FBI agents on top of the fact that we saw police officers moving barricades, opening doors for people, welcoming them into the Capitol. | ||
Again, Pedro, I have a feeling I know your opinion on this. | ||
You're not shocked and you don't think anything's going to happen. | ||
Yeah, actually, my opinion is probably even worse than what you had hoped. | ||
That's basically, again, this is a situation where I'm really sick of just getting angry about things. | ||
And never holding anybody accountable. | ||
And I think this revolves around the whole stolen election narrative. | ||
And I've basically come to the position that, look, the election wasn't stolen, it was given away. | ||
And we now have these reports that are coming out in places like the Washington Post. | ||
And by the way, the liberal media is good now, right? | ||
Because we've got people like Donald Trump saying that. | ||
Well, the liberal media reported that the Trump campaign actually hired two different teams to investigate the integrity of the results in 2020. | ||
And at least one of those teams concluded that the Trump campaign hired, at least one of those | ||
teams concluded before the January 6th stuff, before the rally was held, that devolved into | ||
this, what you could argue was a situation where there were undercover federal agents | ||
who are maybe probably goading people to doing things that ultimately got them in jail. | ||
Well, before that even happened, the Trump campaign was made aware by the people it hired that they could not find enough fraud to argue that the election had been swung in some way for Biden. | ||
Now, I think Democrats did do things that were unethical, but I think that's not a surprise. | ||
Everyone before the 2020 election happened knew that Democrats were going to do something. | ||
Whether it was ballot harvesting or lawfare or whatever. | ||
And they did. | ||
But there was no countermeasures taken. | ||
And so basically you had the situation where the Trump campaign internally knew that basically Democrats had just outfoxed them because they wanted to win more. | ||
And that's ultimately what matters, right? | ||
Who's in the White House. | ||
And still held this rally that devolved into a situation where it looks like you had undercover federal agents that were helping this thing turn into an out-of-control riot. | ||
And that's why I can't just participate in this ridiculous kind of endless thing of outrage. | ||
I mean, in the background of all this, Donald Trump just defended hiring Christopher Wray, and his defense was, well, Chris Christie and the Democrats told me it was a good idea. | ||
He can't bring himself to say it was a mistake to put someone like Christopher Wray in charge of the FBI, at the same time that we're supposed to get angry at the FBI for having undercovers at January 6th. | ||
It's not my, obviously my position is not the one a lot of people want to hear, but it's just really hard to get angry and just participate in this outrage machine when you have all of these other facts to consider. | ||
Well, because kind of what you're saying there is that Trump was sort of in on it and that he knew they weren't going to reverse the results of the election. | ||
And he internally knew that he had lost, but he still set up the people. | ||
And to some degree, he had to know that there were going to be agents in there. | ||
I mean, again, this is one of those things that on January 6th, as it was happening, I was like, this does not seem legit. | ||
They are moving barricades, literally welcoming them into the people's house, Carol. | ||
I have a friend who went to this on January 6th to cover it as a reporter. | ||
And what they say is, they're like, when I go to a July 4th parade at the nation's capital, there are police every five feet. | ||
Here, there was nothing. | ||
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And they were like, we're out of here and left the event. | |
I think That's really the thing is that we all kind of know that it was definitely, you know, not what we saw on television. | ||
But there are not going to be any consequences to this. | ||
And the whistleblower report like has barely been mentioned even in the news. | ||
It's like that doesn't even exist. | ||
The testimony of the whistleblowers is something that nobody's paying any attention to. | ||
It's disheartening because I like to think of myself as very like I believe in America. | ||
I believe in our systems. | ||
I believe in our institutions. | ||
And just the failure at every level for the last few years has to be disheartening. | ||
And I see people opting out of public life, opting out of even social life, because they have such a negative opinion of what's going on with our institutions. | ||
I don't know that they could be rebuilt. | ||
Maybe that's just impossible, but I would love to see a country where we trust institutions again. | ||
Pedro, what about how this, over time, will just degrade these institutions completely? | ||
Because if you're a young person that might want to work at the FBI or the CIA, and you're watching these hearings right now, you're probably, if you're a true patriot, if you believe in America, believe in the institutions, as Carol's saying, how could you take that job? | ||
Yeah, I think, well, you're already seeing this across basically every institution like that. | ||
I mean, like the military is having awful recruitment problems and it's, you know, it's hard to figure out why the military is having a hard time getting people to sign up to die for this, for exactly what we're discussing. | ||
Basically a system that's run by people that hate everyday Americans. | ||
That's what you're supposed to give your life for. | ||
That's what you're supposed to put everything on the line for. | ||
So, yeah, I mean, I think we're witnessing a kind of the free fall of institutional credibility in the United States, | ||
and that's really difficult to fix. | ||
It certainly requires better and more capable leadership, but again, this is something that's been a long time coming | ||
and it's not going to be fixed overnight. | ||
This is, I think, the beginning of a kind of long and sad decline for institutional credibility. | ||
I wanna just add that I keep meeting Donald Trump supporters who are not planning to vote | ||
because they no longer believe that our elections are worth anything. | ||
These are older people who have voted in every election. | ||
They want Donald Trump to win, and they're not planning to vote. | ||
So, you know who we're shooting ourselves in the face? | ||
I mean, this is what's happening on the right. | ||
Yeah, well, all right, so to that point, let's talk a little bit about this upcoming election, because it does sound like our fair governor, Carol Ron DeSantis, is going to jump in probably in the next couple days. | ||
Got a little info here from your paper, the New York Post. | ||
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will officially enter the race for president next week, the Post has learned, setting up a much-anticipated face-off with his one-time ally, former President Donald Trump. | ||
After months of speculation about a White House run, DeSantis, 44, will fire the required paperwork with the Federal Election Commission before holding an announcement event in his hometown of Dunedin, according to a Sunshine State legislative source. | ||
The prospective filing coincides with a two-day meeting between DeSantis and his donors in Miami, where attendees are being told they'll be put to work. | ||
The source added that DeSantis' official announcement will be followed by a staggered rollout of endorsements that have been held in reserve until he gets in the race. | ||
The DeSantis-supporting Never Back Down PAC previously announced the Florida governor has been endorsed by dozens of legislatures, in early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. | ||
Pedro, the first part I wanna mention about that is the 44. | ||
He is 44 years old. | ||
I am 46 years old. | ||
That means I'm older than him. | ||
We are used to be governed, being governed by, you know, people in their late 70s, 80s, and sometimes in their 90s. | ||
It's kind of refreshing, isn't it? | ||
Yeah, that was my first thought actually when I was looking at that screen grab was 44. | ||
It's just so funny because DeSantis is basically the exact opposite of what both Joe Biden and Trump represent. | ||
We're going to get into this, but part of it is precisely that DeSantis is being framed as a kind of Trojan horse by the Trump campaign. | ||
But right now you've got this kind of funny situation where Trump, who's supposed to be the anti-establishment guy, is actually in many ways kind of Legitimizing the old, sclerotic GOP establishment and its ideas. | ||
And on the other hand, you've got this young upstart that actually threatens to kind of upset the apple cart. | ||
And that seems to me pretty obvious why he's so hated by the actual established GOP, which has fallen in line behind Trump. | ||
I mean, it's an incredible situation because of the level of gaslighting that's gone in to convince you that DeSantis represents the old order. | ||
Uh, and these two older guys, or I guess specifically Trump, represents the new order. | ||
A version of that, as I keep saying, would be that Trump is on the side of the mainstream media at this point. | ||
He did a CNN town hall, despite the fact he'll tell you CNN is evil, and he's literally posting links to Joy Reid's website, MSNBC Joy Reid, noted racist from MSNBC Joy Reid, on his Truth Social account. | ||
Carol, look, you very publicly, we got here the same week to Florida, you came from New York, I came from Cali, you've seen the good life here for a year and a half, I take it you're Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, I walk around smiling. | ||
But look, I can't make any decisions about 2024 until I hear what Chris Sununu is going to be doing and Chris Christie. | ||
I have to see, are they running? | ||
What's going on with that? | ||
Well, Chris Christie's not running, I promise you that. | ||
I hope Sununu, Christy, and DeSantis announce in the same day so that the other two can see that there's only one person actually in this race and really they don't belong in it. | ||
I think that what DeSantis has done in Florida has been revolutionary. | ||
I feel like we're in a revolution down here. | ||
We're seeing things from our government that I just never expected to see. | ||
Things like, you know, I was in my son's public school classroom today and like It is a classic classroom where not a single piece of nonsense on any of the walls, not a single trans flag or BLM sign or anything. | ||
And I know I came from Brooklyn and Brooklyn's crazy, but I'm so used to just being on guard and thinking I'm going to look around and see something I don't like. | ||
You know, the worst thing about it was there was a Taylor Swift poster, but I think we can live with that. | ||
And the normalcy here and just the way that DeSantis promotes that normalcy is amazing. | ||
Well, that's the incredible thing to me, because they're trying to frame normalcy and competency and decency as radicalism or somehow this right-wing lunacy, and it's just not true. | ||
Carol, I want to play a clip. | ||
You were on Jordan Peterson's podcast about a week ago and you guys got into why it's important to fight the culture wars and why certain people don't and why certain people do. | ||
I think that's definitely related to what's going on here in Florida. | ||
Take a look. | ||
unidentified
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Conservatives are so damn blind that this goes on under their noses constantly, and they often facilitate its movement forward. | |
And it's because they're either ignorant, that's part of the problem, or they're afraid on the moral front, and neither of those are excusable, especially when, hypothetically, they're concerned about losing the cultural war, which they are definitely losing. | ||
Well, look at the abuse and pushback that Governor DeSantis gets, even from other Republicans. | ||
You know, people that are in the public eye, the Chris Christie's of the world and such, they say things like he, DeSantis sparks cultural wars. | ||
unidentified
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Well, cultural wars are really important because a war for the culture matters. | |
Culture matters. | ||
So yes, we should be fighting these wars. | ||
I think so much of what we talk about is dismissed by the left and we let them dismiss it. | ||
We let them say, oh, this doesn't matter, but it does matter. | ||
And we should be talking about it all the time. | ||
I think that the schools and the fight for our schools is so important. | ||
Pedro, to Carol's point and to Jordan's point, MSNBC right now and Donald Trump and Mike Pence | ||
and Chris Christie and Nikki Haley are all on the same side of Disney against DeSantis right now. | ||
All DeSantis did was even the playing field. | ||
He got rid of crony capitalism, which apparently the leftists and now Trump are for. | ||
It's incredible, actually. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Not only incredible, but it's also, in order to do this, Trump has to repudiate his own position as the culture warrior, right? | ||
The one who is saving us from the extremes of the left. | ||
He's now rooting for Disney. | ||
I think that's problematic for two reasons. | ||
One, like you, and this is the point that I actually keep highlighting, because I think it's powerful and it cuts across both aisles, and that's that really, this is, as much as it is a culture war thing, obviously, like Disney was pushing these radical ideas, Um, on kids through their programming, but it's also a question of who rules. | ||
Are corporations above any accountability? | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Do they get to say, do they get to do whatever they want? | ||
Because I think you have to go back here and remember that this started with the, um, the, the parental rights and education act, right? | ||
Which was really popular in Florida for obvious reasons. | ||
And Disney was not happy with it and basically said, you know, we don't care that Floridians like this bill, uh, that protects families. | ||
From the extreme to the left, we're going to do everything in our power to kill it. | ||
And if it passes, we're going to basically engage in economic warfare against politicians by withholding donations from people that have basically been instrumental to Disney's success, right? | ||
So there's no sense of humility from the company. | ||
And so DeSantis said, no, actually, corporations don't get to do whatever they want. | ||
Floridians are actually in charge of their own state and Disney doesn't get to push around the entire state government. | ||
And I think when you frame it like that, what Trump and Haley and Pence are doing becomes even more disgusting. | ||
They're siding with a corporation that basically has said, like, we rule, not you, the people of Florida. | ||
And the funny part, the interesting part is, so DeSantis is going against the corporations. | ||
I thought the left hated corporations. | ||
He's going against the donor class, which is not happy. | ||
I thought politicians weren't supposed to be owned by donors. | ||
And he went from winning his first election by 30,000 votes to 1.6 million. | ||
So he's clearly doing what the people want, Carol. | ||
Right, there was a Nikki Haley quote where she said something like, he's such a hypocrite because he took money from Disney and he's fighting them anyway. | ||
It's like, yeah, he took money from Disney and he's fighting them anyway. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
You should do that. | ||
You should try that, you know? | ||
Also, the other Nikki Haley line. | ||
You know, I actually quite like Nikki. | ||
I have nothing against her. | ||
But I think that she's gotten into a battle here that makes no sense. | ||
And not just her, obviously. | ||
All the other people, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Chris Christie. | ||
I think that the fight that they're fighting just makes no sense to me. | ||
Obviously, they should be on DeSantis' side, but she said something like, oh, Disney should move Disney World to South Carolina. | ||
The thing that worries me about that is, like, do you really have no concept of how hard it would be to move Disney World? | ||
Do you not know that this enormous thing exists with buildings and communities and all sorts of stuff around it? | ||
Like, do you think we're throwing it on the back of a pickup truck and driving it over to South Carolina? | ||
Can you be president when you don't know stuff like that? | ||
I'm not so sure. | ||
Well, also is the implication, and again, I like Nikki too, personally and professionally, but is the implication, oh, you will then give them special benefits in South Carolina that you won't give other companies because that's all he took away. | ||
But speaking of DeSantis and just basically just doing what's right, it doesn't have to be packaged in anything that fancy. | ||
Here he is yesterday on, you know, that we are not going to be transing these kids. | ||
I mean, if you're taking off the private parts of some 15-year-old kid, you know, you should go to jail for that. | ||
That's just totally unacceptable. | ||
One of the things we did in that bill, though, is we're giving the victims the ability to sue the physicians. | ||
So if you've gone through this, As a 16-year-old or a 15-year-old. | ||
Now you're 24, 25 and you have all this irreversible damage. | ||
You bring suit against them because they violated the Hippocratic Oath. | ||
They put their ideology ahead of evidence-based medicine. | ||
Pedro, everyone knows this is right. | ||
Everyone knows it. | ||
People are afraid to say it, but everyone knows this should not be being done to children. | ||
It really is as simple as that. | ||
I think you should ask yourself, David, what would a rhino do differently than what DeSantis is doing? | ||
That's the level of the discourse right now, right? | ||
It's funny, because simultaneously there are two different attacks on DeSantis right now. | ||
One is that he's beholden to big money, and that's bad for him. | ||
And the second one is that his fights with Disney And his willingness to actually believe in things is going to hurt his support with donors, and that's bad for him. | ||
Both of these lines of attack are being used at the same time against DeSantis. | ||
There was a story in the Financial Times about some big donor who said that he was really turned off by the fact that this DeSantis guy actually seems to believe in the things that he fights for, in particular cultural and social issues, and I don't like that. | ||
That makes me uncomfortable. | ||
And the Trump people were sharing it like it was like, man, this is proof that the donors are turning on him. | ||
And the next day it's like, you know, this guy is a real Trojan horse. | ||
He's controlled entirely by the donors that yesterday, you know, you said he was pissing off because he's willing to actually take on these fights. | ||
I mean, it's insane. | ||
But I think it also just shows that despite all the rhetoric that's coming out of the Trump campaign, because that's ultimately what this is about, right? | ||
They're deeply intimidated by him. | ||
Despite the talk about national polls, which are, I think, irrelevant at this point, this early in the race, I guess, I think they're afraid of him. | ||
You don't act like this. | ||
You don't talk about the guy every single day. | ||
You don't attack him from Well, to that point, I want to show you this ad that I saw literally about a half hour before we started the show. | ||
by the guy and you think that he poses a real threat to you. | ||
Well, to that point, I wanna show you this ad that I saw literally about a half hour | ||
before we started the show. | ||
This is a Donald Trump ad. | ||
So he posted this himself on Instagram and we've got DeSantis doing all of the things | ||
he set out to do one at a time, just knocking down dominoes. | ||
You may not agree with all of them. | ||
I personally disagree with what he did moving up abortion from 15 weeks to six. | ||
That's a personal disagreement I have, and that's fine. | ||
But he's accomplishing everything he set out to do. | ||
Donors be damned. | ||
Here's what Trump put up this morning, and just see if you think there's a little difference in tone and direction and the rest of it. | ||
unidentified
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Ron DeSantis was struggling big time in his primary race for governor of Florida. | |
Polls revealed DeSantis was failing so bad, he was losing by a staggering 17 points. | ||
Then, DeSantis was saved by the endorsement of President Trump. | ||
Trump's support was so powerful, just two days after the endorsement, DeSantis took a commanding lead. | ||
And it propelled him to being elected governor. | ||
I'd like to thank our president for standing by me when it wasn't necessarily the smart thing to do. | ||
You're welcome, Ron. | ||
Unfortunately, instead of being grateful, DeSantis is now attacking the very man who saved his career. | ||
Isn't it time DeSantis remembers how he got to where he is? | ||
Make America great again. | ||
unidentified
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Big League. | |
So good. | ||
Build the wall. | ||
Then Mr. Trump said, you're fired. | ||
I love that part. | ||
unidentified
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Truth is, there's only one person who can make America great again. | |
Carol, I want to give the devil his due here. | ||
Trump did help DeSantis become governor first time around. | ||
He endorsed him and helped him. | ||
There's no doubt about it. | ||
I also voted for Trump last time. | ||
I'm pretty sure both of you did too. | ||
But this thing where he has to be grateful, there's no message there. | ||
There's no reason to vote for Trump there. | ||
It's that you're scared of DeSantis. | ||
And should DeSantis just bow forever? | ||
I just don't think it works. | ||
I don't understand the whole argument from the Trump campaign, and I wrote this in a piece a few weeks ago about this, but, you know, the argument that DeSantis is this horrible, globalist, you know, rhino, donor shill. | ||
Also, I want full credit for his governorship. | ||
And he should just wait four years. | ||
Right? | ||
And he should wait, and then we'll support him then, because then it'll be okay to support this globalist shill. | ||
Look, the Trump campaign is clearly afraid of Ron DeSantis. | ||
The media is clearly afraid of Ron DeSantis. | ||
I don't blame them. | ||
I really see something in him that I don't see in a lot of politicians. | ||
He is a juggernaut. | ||
He is this revolutionary character where he is making some serious changes. | ||
The people who oppose him should be worried because I don't see him losing on a lot of fronts. | ||
That doesn't mean that'll never happen. | ||
It doesn't mean that, you know, DeSantis is going to run away with this nomination. | ||
I think Donald Trump is a formidable opponent and it will be an uphill climb. | ||
But the idea that the Trump campaign is not worried about him is just not jiving with the reality of the way that they're behaving. | ||
And, you know, I don't know if Pedro's going to get into this, but the comments on that article, on that video are just all pro DeSantis. | ||
Here, let me actually show you. | ||
We have a screen capture. | ||
So they disabled, they limited the comments right after putting this up. | ||
Within about 10 or 15 minutes, all of the comments were negative and defending DeSantis and going after Trump and, you know, basically saying, this isn't working and this is nonsense and you've gotta, you know, there's a case to be made for Trump. | ||
He refuses to make it. | ||
So as you can see on the bottom there, I actually, I can't quite see it on the screen. | ||
It says that they're limited or something to that effect. | ||
So that's from the Trump account. | ||
That's from Team Trump himself. | ||
Pedro, he's not making a case for himself. | ||
He's trying to make an anti-case, but... Yeah, yeah. | ||
No, that's right. | ||
And by the way, the same thing happened when Donald Trump Jr. | ||
took a kind of very similar line of attack against DeSantis and posted it on Instagram. | ||
Oh yeah, they did the same thing. | ||
Yeah, and I actually uploaded it to Twitter, just scrolling through an endless stream of negative comments. | ||
People either outright, you know, attacking him for what he said or saying, I support both people, I don't understand why Trump You know, I don't understand why you guys are attacking DeSantis, but they were overwhelmingly negative. | ||
And it's interesting because, again, this just seems to be a kind of social media phenomenon, the kind of DeSantis is over and he's a traitor and stuff. | ||
It's mostly on Twitter, because we've also seen this live, right? | ||
When Trump at rallies tries to attack DeSantis, the audience goes silent. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
Even on Instagram, it doesn't work. | ||
It's basically just Truth Social and Twitter, which, on the one hand, Truth Social is the Trump platform, and on the other hand, it's easy to manipulate Twitter. | ||
You know, there's this article, and this is not, you know, I'm not talking about Russian bots, but there was an article that I think correctly pointed out that there actually does seem to be this kind of organized social media effort, specifically on Twitter, to generate what looks like overwhelming support. | ||
I noticed that whenever I tweet about DeSantis or Trump, I get instant negative replies from like low follower accounts. | ||
It's very bizarre. | ||
But then when you do the same exact content on Instagram, it's just real people who are saying, this is ridiculous, knock it off. | ||
And it's fascinating. | ||
And I think that the point that you're making about how basically Trump is running on it's, I'm owed something. | ||
I'm sorry, that's loser talk. | ||
Losers talk about what they're owed. | ||
And this whole thing of like, I made DeSantis, all me. | ||
Trump oversaw losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022. | ||
DeSantis, you know, you could say with the help of Trump, turned a win into a bigger win and delivered for his constituents. | ||
What did Trump do with the electoral capital that Americans gave him? | ||
He pushed a jailbreak legislation. | ||
He pushed amnesty. | ||
He was bragging about amnesty. | ||
I mean, think back to like the Breitbart headlines, Amnesty Don, Trump bragging about pushing a bigger amnesty than anything Obama had considered. | ||
And that was being pushed even to the end of his administration. | ||
And there was talk internally about doing it either at the end of his first administration or early in the second administration. | ||
I think that's really important. | ||
And by the way, in order to attack the, because Trump knows this is all true, by the way, and in order to attack the An image of DeSantis as a winner, because he is. | ||
Trump recently pointed out that DeSantis also endorsed Carrie Lake, who's a loser. | ||
In other words, Trump tossed Carrie Lake under the bus to take a shot at DeSantis. | ||
And by the way, he did the same thing two weeks ago when he got those 12 Florida legislators to come to Mar-a-Lago to endorse him. | ||
The next morning, he put out this insane anti-Florida diatribe, basically making them all look like fools. | ||
Several people who I like a lot, including Byron Donalds. | ||
It's like, he just threw you under the bus. | ||
Dude, Carol, am I crazy, but I do think there's an out here. | ||
And the out here would be that over the next couple weeks as DeSantis gains momentum and people are just like, you know what, this is the competent guy, he's younger, it's a real team, it's no circus, it's what everyone said that they wanted out of Trump, it's serious policy without the crazy tweets and all that, that Trump might, like if anyone on Trump's team is watching this, like the out that still makes you the hero here. | ||
It's just to be like, you know what? | ||
I have sciatica. | ||
I twisted my ankle. | ||
I can't do it. | ||
But there is a guy that's pretty good. | ||
And I've gone a little harsh on him, but actually I take it back because my family and me and all my grandchildren live in his state. | ||
Many of them moved here because of him during COVID. | ||
And let's do this together and let's save America. | ||
It's like there's such a nice ending that's so obvious here. | ||
But can he take it? | ||
Can he take it? | ||
There's no way he'll take it. I thought that there was no reason for Donald Trump to run this time. | ||
I had met him at Mar-a-Lago. He seemed like his life was going fantastically after leaving the | ||
White House. His life just seemed so much better. He was so much calmer, happier. And I kept thinking | ||
this guy could be kingmaker. | ||
He can be that role that he thinks he played for Ron DeSantis. | ||
He could literally come into races and be like, this is my guy, and that guy can go on to win. | ||
And he can play that role for so many different candidates, potentially. | ||
But instead, he decided no. | ||
He needs his course to settle, and he wants to run again. | ||
From my perspective, this run makes no sense. | ||
But look, he wants to do it again. | ||
Like, that's fine. | ||
I would also say that the way that the media is going after DeSantis, they're really treating him like the frontrunner. | ||
The piece in Politico today, where they really go hard against Casey DeSantis, getting quotes from Roger Stone about how she's Lady Macbeth, and then this writer goes on for several paragraphs about how the comparison actually does fit. | ||
I find it all so disgusting, but the fact is that they're doing this to DeSantis and not Trump right now, and there's a reason for that. | ||
I've been saying it for weeks. | ||
Everybody's going after DeSantis. | ||
MSNBC and Trump are on the same side. | ||
Pedro, first appearance, last word. | ||
Yeah, well, I could not help but notice the hilarity of Politico basically observing a healthy marriage between Casey and Ron DeSantis, | ||
basically writing an article about why it's problematic and then quoting, getting a comment from Roger Stone | ||
for that story. | ||
Stone, a guy who has allegedly been very active in swinger circles and put out ads asking for men | ||
to sleep with his wife. | ||
But I think that the issue is that the, The enemy of the people, to use the term that Trump coined | ||
about the media, is actually in the tank with Trump against DeSantis. | ||
Because they know that he's actually a far greater threat to them, | ||
and he also won't give them access. | ||
He won't give Maggie Haberman exclusive interviews on demand, and they hate him for it. | ||
Yeah, that's absolutely right. | ||
He said to MSNBC, you lie about me constantly. | ||
We're not going to do this anymore. | ||
However, I will continue to do this with you guys. | ||
I've enjoyed it. | ||
Thank you, Pedro, for your first appearance. | ||
Carol, you're welcome back anytime. | ||
And we've got a post-game show in about 37 seconds at rubinreport.locals.com. | ||
Everybody else have a great weekend. |