June 18, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
13:46
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| As people are going to figure out in about seven seconds, your accent is not Hungarian. | ||
| So what brings a guy like you to a country like this? | ||
| Well, I see the political future of conservatism in America is being worked out here in Hungary. | ||
| In Budapest. | ||
| And that's fascinating to me. | ||
| I first came to Budapest around 2018 on a book tour, but also I came a year later to do research for my book, Live Not by Lies, which is about the message that people who survived communism in Europe, Soviet communism, the message they have for us in the West today about the new, softer totalitarianism that they see emerging. | ||
| And I thought it was really exaggerated when they first started telling me this about, I don't know, eight, nine years ago. | ||
| But the more I listened to them, I'm talking about America, these immigrants, the more I listened to them, the more I realized they were seeing something that was completely oblivious, that we Americans are oblivious to. | ||
| So I came to travel throughout the former Soviet bloc, Hungary, Poland, other countries, to talk to those who had stayed behind and were dissidents, to find out what do we need to know. | ||
| And they're so sensible in this part of the world, and they really know, to use a phrase, what time it is. | ||
| So I thought, you know what? | ||
| I want to live here and learn what I can from these people and try to bring the lessons that I've learned about politics and about culture and the fight we're in to try to make it better known to my own people back in America. | ||
| Plus, it's just a great place to live. | ||
| Well, the view ain't bad from up here. | ||
| Ain't bad. | ||
| What is it specifically, though, about Hungarians or Hungarian culture that seems to be leading this? | ||
| Because there's obviously plenty of other countries bordering right here that maybe aren't doing it quite as well. | ||
| There seems to be something happening right here. | ||
| The difference is Viktor Orban, the prime minister here. | ||
| You don't hear this at all in the American media. | ||
| He's demonized this sort of fascist who is authoritarian, crushing his country. | ||
| That was the received opinion I had the first time I came here in 2018. | ||
| I was here to speak at a conference on religious liberty. | ||
| After the conference was over, we were told that the Prime Minister would like to meet some of the speakers. | ||
| I went in there thinking it was going to be a meet and greet, shake hands with them, hear a few canned phrases, and off we go. | ||
| That man spent 90 minutes talking to us, taking our questions. | ||
| In good English, he was warm, he was funny, and you could tell he had really thought about | ||
| these things. | ||
| The Americans there, we couldn't believe it. | ||
| You would never hear that from any of our politicians, left and right, the ability to | ||
| think on your feet and to have thought deeply about these issues. | ||
| Viktor Orban I've come to find out since then. | ||
| I've met him a couple more times and read more about him now that I've lived here. | ||
| I mean, he's everywhere. | ||
| Here's a man who is a real visionary. | ||
| And Americans just don't know about it because our media and the Republican establishment are keeping him at arm's length. | ||
| But when I invite Americans over, I meet you coming over here. | ||
| If you meet Orban, or if you spend any time in Hungary, you realize he is not, and this country is not what we're told. | ||
| And in fact, this guy, I think, sees the future for the right. | ||
| It's so interesting because the way the media permeates everything, even if you somehow intellectually know something's not true, I find sometimes you have to see it for yourself. | ||
| I told you, I just spent 15 minutes with him. | ||
| By chance, we walked over there and he was able to say hi. | ||
| Friendly, warm, and just immediately just wanted to tell me why he loves this country. | ||
| And in essence, to distill it down, he basically said, it's our country and we don't want to be told how to live. | ||
| And I thought, man, We could use a little of that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| In America. | ||
| I was at his speech at CPAC, both in Dallas last year and here in Hungary recently. | ||
| And his speech really does contain the things that we American conservatives need in order to revitalize conservatism here. | ||
| in our country. He was talking about how the virus, he calls it a virus, of wokeness, of | ||
| gender ideology, of open borders migration, all of it is designed to dissolve the nation | ||
| state and to dissolve peoples. If we are going to hold on to what makes us who we are, we | ||
| need to stand up against it, call it out for what it is, and don't be fooled by it. | ||
| The thing that Orban sees that so many American conservatives don't is that the left has colonized every institution of civil society. | ||
| When I talk to Hungarians about what's happened to our military, to the CIA, Big business. | ||
| And to every other institution, they really can't believe it. | ||
| Orban saw a long time ago that this was happening, and he knew that the only way traditional conservatives could stand up to what the NGOs, George Soros, and all the other wokesters and open borders people were doing was to use politics in an aggressive way. | ||
| We don't see that in our country. | ||
| Ron DeSantis is the only one in our country at the senior level of Republican leadership who seems to get that. | ||
| Do you think that can be expanded throughout America? | ||
| I mean, we talked about it a bit at the event last night, but, you know, I'm living it, literally living it in Florida, and it changed my life. | ||
| I had to move 3,000 miles from California to Florida. | ||
| I see it happening here. | ||
| Do you think that can be replicated properly in America, or are our politics too calcified at this point? | ||
| Well, no, it can, but we have to be careful. | ||
| I mean, we were talking last night, you and I, about Israel and Hungary and their success stories. | ||
| One of the things that makes their politics play out the way they do is they have an underlying sense | ||
| of national unity. | ||
| I mean, here in Hungary, it is a homogeneous country, ethnically and culturally. | ||
| And that matters. I mean, of course there are really harsh political disputes here, | ||
| but ultimately they have this sense of this is where the tribe lives. | ||
| The Magyar tribe, we've been here for a thousand years, and we have to keep our country going. | ||
| The United States is a much more diverse place, and that's not, there's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| It's just it is what it is. | ||
| And it's why you can't just pick up Orbanism and plug it into America. | ||
| But what we can do and what we have to do is unite our country, America, around the principles of the Constitution, you know, and not to be afraid to talk about the importance of free speech and things that are in the Bill of Rights that are under constant attack by the woke. | ||
| We can defend those things, but we also have to understand that using the standard methods of defense, which is what the Republican Party has been offering, ain't gonna work anymore. | ||
| Because things changed in the Great Awokening. | ||
| All of the institutions are lined up against us. | ||
| When you see what DeSantis is doing in Florida by going in, taking on woke capitalism with Disney, and trying to get DEI and wokeness out of the schools, that's pure Orban. | ||
| And it's the only thing that's going to work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do you see the pushback here? | ||
| I've been trying to figure out, you know, it's very easy for me to diagnose what's going on with our left in America. | ||
| It's sort of, it really has become radicalized and I wish there was a good left. | ||
| That we could debate with, honestly. | ||
| It just doesn't seem to exist. | ||
| What's the sort of temperature on that here? | ||
| Yeah, I hesitate to speak too boldly because I don't speak Hungarian yet. | ||
| And so I miss a lot of the nuance in the local debates. | ||
| But generally speaking, the left in Hungary is run by a man named Drasan, who at the time of the fall of communism was a head of the Communist Youth League. | ||
| He's still the big guy in left-wing politics here. | ||
| And by the way, seven years after the fall of communism, this guy became one of the richest men in Hungary. | ||
| Funny how that happens. | ||
| You don't say. | ||
| You don't say. | ||
| And so a lot of the people who remember communism, they're totally on Orban's side because he was a very brave student, anti-communist leader. | ||
| You can go on YouTube and find this video of a speech he gave in 1988 as communism was falling. | ||
| They were reburying a man who was a communist leader in 1956 at the time of the Soviet invasion, but he was a patriot and the Soviets hanged him. | ||
| Imran Najd was his name. | ||
| Orban, as a student leader, he's got a mullet and all that, he's totally 80s. | ||
| He gave this very brave speech in which he told the Soviets to get the hell out of their country. | ||
| This was a time when communism was still ruling this country and that became the basis for his later political career. | ||
| So the left today in Hungary is still run by this old-fashioned communist, but they've smoothed things out and now they're proper bureaucrats, meaning they want rule from Brussels, they want open borders, they want George Soros and all the whole package. | ||
| The lucky thing for this country is they're completely disorganized. | ||
| I was here last year, 2022, for the election, which Orban and his Fidesz party won overwhelmingly, a landslide, and they weren't supposed to win. | ||
| Living here in Hungary, knowing Hungarians, talking to ordinary Hungarians in the bar, in the coffee shop, the taxi, Many of them complained about this or that about Orban. | ||
| Anybody after 12 years in power is going to have that. | ||
| But in the end, it all came down to, but of course I'm going to vote for him. | ||
| Have you seen the left? | ||
| Because they're completely incompetent. | ||
| They had this guy who was there, a guy named Marky Zoy. | ||
| He was their standard bearer in 2022. | ||
| He gave this comment. | ||
| He said, we're the true diverse coalition. | ||
| We have communists and fascists in the coalition, which was true, but you're not supposed to say that. | ||
| Coming to our Democrat party, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, get this, Dave. | ||
| The media, the Western media, did not report that at all. | ||
| They would only come to Budapest, talk to Budapest liberals, and they totally missed everything. | ||
| They thought that because Orban was opposed to NATO's policy in Ukraine, that, oh, the Hungarians are going to throw him out. | ||
| No, he spoke for them. | ||
| They don't want war. | ||
| So when I chatted with him just briefly a moment ago, I asked him about how he deals with the media and he kind of laughed it off. | ||
| Like he just, it seems clear to me, he simply does not care. | ||
| Do you think that really is the prescription for all of this? | ||
| That we need more political leaders who just don't care? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| He's so confident, and he's so smart. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| He's not a crude, brutish guy. | ||
| He says what's on his mind. | ||
| He had a smile on his face the entire time. | ||
| It was so contrasted with what you hear of the guy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And he's a brilliant man. | ||
| He knows what he believes, and he's also ready to fight. | ||
| He fights constantly. | ||
| Some Hungarians say maybe he's too quick to start a fight, but I tell you, I'd rather | ||
| have that than the Republicans we have who are willing to roll over at every turn. | ||
| And as much as Viktor Orban loves Donald Trump, the huge difference between Orban and Trump | ||
| is Orban believes a lot of the things Trump does, but he also knows how to turn those | ||
| beliefs into policy. | ||
| He's got discipline, and he's got political skills. | ||
| This is why I look to DeSantis. | ||
| I try to tell my Hungarian friends that DeSantis is the successor to Orban, or the American version of Orban. | ||
| Yeah, interesting. | ||
| All right, so one more for you. | ||
| As a new guy in this country, what would you tell people that are watching this going, boy, I should probably spend a little more time there? | ||
| I would say come over here. | ||
| There's no substitute for actually coming to Hungary and seeing for yourself. | ||
| When Americans come over, I tell them one of the first things you need to know is the international media and the Washington establishment treat Hungary the same way conservatives are treated in the United States. | ||
| You know, you're nothing but a bunch of bigots and backwards deplorables. | ||
| When you actually get here to Hungary, you see it ain't true. | ||
| It's not true at all. | ||
| And the more time you spend here, you realize how blessedly normal this country is. | ||
| Low crime. | ||
| They have dissent and they struggle here. | ||
| It's a normal country in that sense. | ||
| But it's also a stable country. | ||
| And one of the reasons, almost alone among European capitals, that Budapest is so safe is because Orban would not allow open migration. | ||
| I remember going to Paris in the summer of 2021. | ||
| I was here in Budapest on a fellowship. | ||
| I went to Paris on a book tour and everybody was afraid then because there was lots of Palestinian and Islamic radicalism going on, anti-semitic attacks. | ||
| People in Paris were all talking about Is this the start of a civil war? | ||
| And I realized, oh my God, Victor Orban was right. | ||
| If you allow open borders and you allow people who hate your society and who don't want to integrate to come in, this is what happens. | ||
| They're never going to get rid of that problem. | ||
| Come here to Hungary, learn how they do it, and go back to America with a sense of vision. | ||
| Tucker Carlson got this vision, Dave. | ||
| He came here in 2021, saw for himself how different this country was to the way it's presented in the American media, and he changed the narrative at the grassroots level about Hungary. | ||
| We saw what happened to Tucker. | ||
| There are a lot of powerful people in America who don't want Yeah, and I suspect we have not heard the last from Tucker. | ||
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unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| hungry, much less come here and learn any lessons from it. | ||
| I'm here to tell you, and I'm glad you're here, it's not what they say. Come see for | ||
| yourself. | ||
| Yeah, and I suspect we have not heard the last from Tucker. | ||
| No, no, no. Please God. | ||
| Rod, it was great to see you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks Dave. | |
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about international issues, check out our international playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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