July 16, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| And one of the things that the BBC organizers said at the beginning is that, you know, this is about saving ourselves, our economic models, because we are, you know, most people look at us and they say CNN and BBC are competitors, but we aren't. | ||
| The real competition is coming from these thousands of emerging alternative media sites that are eroding trust. | ||
| in the legacy sites and are taking away our business model. | ||
| and we need to bond together. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an environmental lawyer, author, and candidate | ||
| for President of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
| Sorry it took me so long. | ||
| No, I'm glad to have you, and with all the media stuff you've been going through over the last couple weeks, you've given us plenty to talk about. | ||
| First off, though, you usually do these interviews sitting in your library. | ||
| Am I getting the special office interview, or what's going on here? | ||
| I'm in a hotel room in New York City. | ||
| Hotel in New York, I'll take it. | ||
| All right, so let's dive into it. | ||
| I thought, before we get into some of the specifics and all the media stuff that's been happening and everything else, I was once a Democrat. | ||
| And when we talk about you on my show, people often ask, Dave, what makes RFK a Democrat at this point? | ||
| This isn't 1960, 1970, 1980. | ||
| So I guess that's my first question to you. | ||
| What sort of lines you up with the modern Democrat party at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I don't. | |
| My loyalty and affiliation and affinity for the Democratic Party is, you know, for the party that I grew up with. | ||
| And I think, you know, what's happening in the party today is unfortunate. | ||
| I do think the party, I do believe the party is redeemable, ultimately. | ||
| So, and I think our country's redeemable. | ||
| And I think we need both of those things to happen. | ||
| If you went through a checklist, Dave, of all of the things that my uncle John Kennedy, my father Robert Kennedy believed in and Edward Kennedy believed in, I would kind of check probably every item on the list. | ||
| Whereas today, you know, some of the issues that the Democratic Party has embraced are things that I'm uncomfortable with. | ||
| And I think a lot of people around the country are. | ||
| And a lot of the traditional base of the Democratic Party, which was working people's unions, American middle class, and now more and more Minorities, blacks and Hispanics are moving away from the Democratic Party because they feel like they've been neglected and that the party is not representing their interests anymore or their values. | ||
| What do you think the best way to sort of separate what I would consider the old school classical liberals, guys like you and your uncle and your father, from what's going on with the more radical progressive branch? | ||
| Well, you know, I try not to badmouth anybody. | ||
| I think there's been enough of that in this country, and people are done with it. | ||
| And we need to find a path back to civility. | ||
| And to end this very, very toxic polarization. | ||
| So I try not to, you know, condemn other people. | ||
| And I just, I talk about the things that I believe in, which are the traditional values of the Democratic Party. | ||
| I try to find, and I've always done this, Try to identify the values that we have in common rather than focusing on the issues that hold us apart. | ||
| You know, I spent 35 years as one of the leading environmental champions in this country, but I was speaking Regularly, probably doing 60 big speeches a year to mainly Republican groups. | ||
| And I was getting standing ovations in most of them because I didn't focus on the issues. | ||
| There's no such thing as Republican children or Democratic children. | ||
| We all want a clean environment. | ||
| And yet it had become a very partisan issue. | ||
| So I tried to talk about the environment in a way That every American could embrace. | ||
| And I think most of us, 80% of us, agree on 99% of the issues. | ||
| Yeah, have you been shocked at the way the media has been treating you? | ||
| Because you've been out there basically talking to everybody, having open conversations. | ||
| You're talking to people on the right, you're talking to people on the left, and the media has gone after you in an absolutely crazy way. | ||
| I want to read one headline to you. | ||
| It's about your wife, who I adore, and we were sort of in similar circles when I lived in L.A., and I love Curb. | ||
| But this headline that I'm sure you saw from the New York Times, Cheryl Hines, the Curb Your Enthusiasm actress, is beloved in Hollywood. | ||
| Now she's supporting the presidential campaign of her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | ||
| Is she normalizing his often dangerous ideas? | ||
| I actually retweeted it, and I asked people to come up with some of your dangerous ideas, and nobody seems to really know what they are, but that doesn't stop the New York Times. | ||
| Yeah, and all of my conspiracy theories, as it turns out, have come true. | ||
| They're no longer theories. | ||
| They're now proven hypotheses. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I do wonder about it. | ||
| I was thinking about this this morning, that because of this kind of this hailstorm of negative publicity about me, really kind of not It goes beyond, like, hit pieces to be just this, you know, poisonous vitriol. | ||
| And that it's coming from all the legacy media, from the Atlantic Monthly, from New York Magazine, New Yorker, from the Washington Post, from the New York Times, from Vanity Fair, Daily Beast, Daily Kos, Rolling Stone. | ||
| And many, many others. | ||
| And they all kind of use the same talking points. | ||
| And they also are not accurate. | ||
| You know, none of them has really written an accurate. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons it doesn't trouble me is because it's just inaccuracies, distortions, mischaracterizations. | ||
| But one of the things that kind of occurred to me Is that there's something bigger at play than just their kind of hatred of me. | ||
| I feel like I'm kind of on the spear tip of a war between this declining legacy media And the evolving and emerging new media, the podcasters, all of these alternative news sites. | ||
| And I'm in a litigation right now against an organization called the TNI, the Trusted News Initiative. | ||
| The Trusted News Initiative was a conspiracy. | ||
| That was initiated by BBC, where they called together all of the legacy news sites, including API, the Associated Press, Reuters, the UPI, the Washington Post, and many, many others. | ||
| And they married them to the social media sites, to Microsoft, to Google, Facebook, Twitter, And they all made an agreement with each other that they would censor certain kinds of information. | ||
| For example, any information about COVID that departed from government orthodoxies, but also information that challenged any kind of political orthodoxies, like any reports on Hunter Biden's laptop. | ||
| Reports about the Ukraine war were inconsistent with the official US positions. | ||
| And this was an extraordinary thing. | ||
| This has never happened before. | ||
| But we obtained during the litigation the internal Communications and one of the things that the BBC organizers said at the beginning is that, you know, this is about saving ourselves, our economic models, because we are, you know, most people look at us and they say CNN and BBC are competitors, but we aren't. | ||
| The real competition is coming from these thousands of emerging alternative media sites that are eroding trust In the in the legacy sites and are taking away our our business model. | ||
| And we need to bond together. | ||
| And so the way it worked was that they would all identify issues and identify individuals who were saying things that should be censored. | ||
| They would notify each other of those of those posts or those articles and of those individuals. | ||
| They would censor them and then The social media sites would not allow the sites that printed them on. | ||
| So if you were, you know, GreenMedInfo, which is a site that provides wellness information, or Joe Mercola, or one of these sites, these others, or Breitbart, or somebody who was departing from governmental orthodoxies, you would find yourself banned on social media. | ||
| And those sites absolutely require Social media for their business models. | ||
| So if you prevent them from going viral, the way their business model works is they put in articles, they print articles, or publish articles, and then go viral. | ||
| That's the only way that they grow, that they can earn advertising dollars. | ||
| So if you cut them off there, and this is what the memo from BBC said, we need to choke off those sites. | ||
| So they wanted to kill all those sites. | ||
| And they did it by agreeing on a single narrative, which was the official government narrative, and then censoring or ridiculing or throttling or shadow banning. | ||
| Anybody who challenged those orthotoxies. | ||
| So you have, you know, the legacy media, which traditionally was functioning as guardians of the First Amendment of free expression. | ||
| They were, you know, they were supposed to courageously speak truth to power, maintain this posture of fierce skepticism towards big aggregations of power, government, corporations, and they now become the opposite. | ||
| They become propagandists with the powerful and oppressors of free speech and the enemies of the First Amendment. | ||
| And that, you know, I find myself, I now see. | ||
| Myself as a spear tip of this emerging media, which is in an economic competition, but also kind of an ideological, you know, Armageddon with the old media sites. | ||
| And, you know, so I'm being championed by Russell Brad and by Joe Rogan and by, you know, Lex Friedman and all of these, you know, kind of alternative media giants. | ||
| In a battle, and I think they see that as well. | ||
| Russell Brand said to me something about that the other day that sent me thinking, you know, how they need to, those sites really need to understand where we all are in this, where they are in this world of, you know, of disruption of the old, of the old business model. | ||
| Right, and it's really bizarre because even now when they've been so frequently exposed for the censorship, your interview with my friend Jordan Peterson from about two weeks ago was taken down on YouTube and then they put it up on Rumble and now you're on Rumble and they're not censoring anybody. | ||
| But what do you think about, so what would you do? | ||
| So if you were president of the United States, what would you do in terms of big tech? | ||
| Is it breaking them up? | ||
| Is it regulating them? | ||
| How do you connect that to what you just described with the legacy media that's offering, you know, that's usually pushing the pressure on big tech to do these things? | ||
| And then, of course, the connections we now know with the CIA and FBI and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, well, more and more, you know, we're beginning to understand, you know, the judicial decision this week by Judge Doge in the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General's cases, I think really lays it out that the social media sites were kind of victims as well. | ||
| Of the censorship because they were and I was you know, I'm in judge that the decision is 155 pages and it's a decision that forbids the Biden White House. | ||
| I'm having any contact with social media sites. | ||
| It's extraordinary injunction and it's I think it's bulletproof. | ||
| I think that's why he did this, you know, 155 page decision because he wanted to lay out the evidence. | ||
| And he talks about the history about how the Biden administration initiated this censorship push, a blitzkrieg. | ||
| And I was the first one that they ordered censored. | ||
| Oh, the Biden administration came into office on January 21st, 2021. | ||
| On January 23rd, they contacted Facebook, the White House contacted Facebook and asked them to start to remove me. | ||
| And then three weeks later, there was a battle. | ||
| The people in the White House were threatening Facebook. | ||
| With withdrawal of their Section 230 immunity, which is existential threat to them. | ||
| Section 230, of course, is the liability shield. | ||
| So that, you know, if you defamed, you know, Donald Trump on Facebook and said something that was untrue, that you knew to be untrue, that was scurrilous and very damaging, He can sue you, but he can't sue Facebook. | ||
| Facebook is supposed to be a neutral platform, and it cannot be sued, and that's called Section 230. | ||
| Mark Zuckerberg said, if we lose that, it's existential. | ||
| We cease to exist. | ||
| They would actually have to censor more in that case because they would have more liability, so they'd be basically censoring everybody. | ||
| They would need to have lawyers read every single post and assess it for defamation. | ||
| There would be no way to do it. | ||
| It would just collapse. | ||
| So, and that's what the White House was threatening. | ||
| If you don't censor these guys, we're going to withdraw your Section 230 immunity. | ||
| So, the White House was strong-arming them in the most powerful way to censor, and then the White House invited in all of these agencies, the really weird agencies like the Census Bureau. | ||
| I mean, the CIA was involved, the FBI was involved. | ||
| The DH had, the Department of Homeland Security was involved, but also like the IRS and the Census Bureau and a whole bunch of other agencies were all involved in identifying people that needed to be censored. | ||
| And the things they were censoring were really crazy. | ||
| You know, it was the same thing that TNI was censoring, like Hunter Biden's laptop. | ||
| You weren't allowed to talk about that. | ||
| Anything to do with the Wuhan lab, you couldn't talk about. | ||
| But also personal attacks on the president. | ||
| There was a parody of the president and his wife. | ||
| Um, that, uh, that they ordered taken down. | ||
| So this is, you know, really, this is like King George III, you know, back in the revolution. | ||
| This is the reason we had the revolution was that and put the First Amendment in place so that the king or the ruler could not silence critics because if government can silence its critics, it has license for any atrocity. | ||
| So what would your policy be? | ||
| Would it be that you'd break up some of these companies, or would it be that you'd be regulating them, or let them collapse? | ||
| First of all, on day one, I'm going to issue executive orders forbidding any federal agency | ||
| from engaging in censorship activities or recommendations or contacts with these | ||
| companies regarding posts that they don't like. | ||
| There's of course things that should be removed from the internet, you know, but it's unprotected speech. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| You know, pedophilia and, you know, inciting violence and, you know, those kind of things, you can censor without violating the First Amendment because they're not... Right, they're illegal. | ||
| Yeah, they're illegal and they're not protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| But otherwise, I'm going to order them all, not only am I going to order them to stop censoring, But I'm going to basically reinstate the Smith-Munth Act, which has been effectively just forgotten about and abandoned. | ||
| That forbids the federal agencies from propagandizing American people. | ||
| And that is just as frightening what's happening now with active propaganda by the CIA through all of these legitimate media sites. | ||
| of debates about the Ukraine war and about things that Americans should not be propagandized about. | ||
| I think everybody should be able to talk about these things, but we should know who it is talking. | ||
| We shouldn't have the CIA running reporters and Rolling Stone and Daily Kos and Daily Beast and telling us, you know, pretending that they're neutral reporters. | ||
| How worried are you that what Trump describes as the swamp, or what you're just, you know, the CIA, the three-letter agencies, the deep state, all of this stuff, that going against it and talking about it the way you talk about it, which is somewhat similar to the way Trump talks about it, that it's a machine that is so embedded, or as your uncle used to talk about, that secrecy cannot be a piece of a flourishing democracy, but it's so embedded in everything right now, all of our agencies, all of our institutions, ESG, all of these things, Yeah, I don't believe that. | ||
| You know, I'm very excited about having an opportunity to fix it. | ||
| and you can do executive actions and all that, but somehow the system, the swamp just keeps moving forward. | ||
| Yeah, I don't believe that. | ||
| I'm very excited about having an opportunity to fix it. | ||
| I've spent, and I think I'm uniquely positioned to do that because I've spent 40 years suing these agencies | ||
| and thinking about how do you unravel agency capture? | ||
| And I've sued. | ||
| I'm I've had suits involving almost all the major agencies, NIH, CDC, FDA, HHS, and then the Department of Agriculture because I've spent | ||
| I spent 20 years suing factory farms and big processed food producers. | ||
| I saw how that agency has been taken over by industrial agriculture. | ||
| I was completely drifted away from its mission of protecting small family farmers and providing America a wholesome food supply. | ||
| I'm involved now with litigation that involves the Department of Transportation. | ||
| I'm representing a thousand families. | ||
| Norfolk Southern spill upended their lives, and that spill happened because of agency capture. | ||
| In many of these agencies, and of course, probably 20% of the 500 environmental cases that I've been involved with have been against EPA, which is captured by the pesticide industry, by the Oil and coal industry. | ||
| When I sued Monsanto, we came across emails, secret emails that Monsanto had exchanged with the head of the pesticide division, a guy called Jess Roland, who was taking a federal paycheck and supposedly working for the taxpayer, but secretly He was working for Monsanto. | ||
| And this is the problem, is that most of the people who work at these agencies are well-intentioned individuals, they're patriots, they're good government employees, good public servants. | ||
| But the people who tend to rise to the top and become the division heads, the branch heads, and of course, you know, the directors of those departments, are people who are in the tank with the industry. | ||
| And they, you know, set the tone and they set the agenda for the whole. | ||
| So I need to go in there and do that. | ||
| You know, I've spent... | ||
| A lot of my life studying the CIA because my family's 60-year fistfight with that agency. | ||
| I know how my uncle was going to try to reorganize the agency if he hadn't been killed. | ||
| I know exactly what my father was going to do with the agency. | ||
| In fact, he had a long conversation with it a week before he died with Pete Hamill, my friend, who was a reporter who was covering him. | ||
| I don't think it's a hard thing to do. | ||
| You need to get rid of the perverse incentives these financial entanglements with the agencies have with the industries they're supposed to regulate. | ||
| You need to move around certain individuals and you need to put in place really good laws against revolving doors. | ||
| Which is part of the problem. | ||
| People work for 20 years for the federal government for one of these agencies and as soon as they're pension fast, they move over to the industry that they've been regulating. | ||
| And so they want a good job and a lot of them are the heads of departments now. | ||
| And they end up doing a bunch of favors for these companies right before they leave. | ||
| In order to get the paybacks and I can give you example after example of that, but we need you know right now They just have to wait 12 months. | ||
| We need a five-year wait to make sure to get rid of those revolving doors And I you know, but I think it can be fixed Dave. | ||
| I you know, I'm very confident That's something I'm very very excited about doing and I'm gonna go to the agencies myself I'm going to go to Bethesda, and I'm going to go to the EPA, and I'm going to have direct interactions with those agencies and make sure that the State Department, which is now run from top to bottom by neocons, whose job is to keep us involved in these constant wars, and we need to move those people out. | ||
| And reinstall the integrity in those agencies and the public purpose. | ||
| So I sense you see a bit of a connection between, say, some of the coverage that you get in places like the New York Times and your criticism of the agencies and things like that. | ||
| You see this as sort of one insidious web, which I think is deeply also connected to the Democrat party these days. | ||
| I mean, the fact that you're polling in some places over 20% right now, and they are making it very, very clear | ||
| that they're not gonna put you on a debate stage. | ||
| I mean, a lot of Democrats, I think, are not happy about this. | ||
| I know a lot of Republicans are not happy about it, and they're happy to talk to you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things I said in my speech, | ||
| in Boston, is that the people who are normally put in charge of these agencies, and... | ||
| And this was what Trump did, too. | ||
| You know, Trump came in and he promised to drain the swamp. | ||
| And then, you know, he put me he named me as head of the Vaccine Safety Commission. | ||
| And I started that function. | ||
| I met with Fauci. | ||
| I met with Collins and was putting together that, you know, project. | ||
| And then when that news got out, Pfizer gave a million dollar contribution to Trump. | ||
| And Trump appointed two Pfizer's handpicked candidates, Alex Azar, to run HHS and Scott Gottlieb, who was a partner of Pfizer | ||
| to run FDA. And, you know, Gottlieb came in there, did an $88 billion gift to Operation Warp Speed | ||
| for Pfizer and then left to join Pfizer's board and collect his payoff. So, you know, that | ||
| is the swamp. And, you know, people come in wanting to change it, but they get intimidated by | ||
| these big agencies and they, and they, you know, get frightened because, yeah, the | ||
| agency can hurt you. | ||
| You know, if you go after that agency. | ||
| There's a lot of top level officials in there who can commit all kinds of civil disobediences that will embarrass the president. | ||
| And so what they do is they appoint somebody who's safe. | ||
| They look at the agency. | ||
| They say, I'd like to change that, but I got other agendas. | ||
| They leave the whole, you know, instrument of corruption intact and they appoint somebody who's safe. | ||
| And that person, you know, Ralph Reed once said to me, the guys who get those jobs are the guys who get the joke, you know? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| What I said in my announcement speech is, I get the joke, but I don't think it's funny, you know? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And I'm not safe. | ||
| No, I'm not, you know, my job is to keep the American people safe. | ||
| But I'm not going to be safe with the status quo. | ||
| I'm going to be the worst nightmare for the status quo. | ||
| So for all the people that hear you, the independents, what I would say are the remaining sort of old school liberals, and for even some conservatives who are open to a lot of these ideas, and a lot of the stuff you're talking about, it's sort of Trumpian in a certain sense, it's stuff that Tucker Carlson talks about, I want to get to the Ukraine war in a second. | ||
| But what's the way to get you on that stage so that there can be a debate between you and Joe Biden? | ||
| Because to me, the difference would be so stark that that could start the avalanche. | ||
| Like, that seems to be the chance. | ||
| What can you do with the Democrat Party, in essence, is what I'm asking. | ||
| You know, I think we need to go with the Democratic Party into a debate. | ||
| I mean, we're in a period in history where, you know, so many Americans no longer believe in the political process. | ||
| They think it's rigged against them. | ||
| And, you know, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party ought to be doing their best to showcase gold standard elections. | ||
| And to tell, you know, the American people, democracy counts, your vote counts, your opinion counts. | ||
| And we're actually going to do retail campaigning, we're going to have debates, we're going to, you know, we're not going to be like the Soviet Union where, you know, where the party would pick the candidate and tell you, you know, here's who you vote for and there's no real contest going on and no real choice. | ||
| This is America. | ||
| We're, we, you know, we modeled democracy for the world. | ||
| We should have a model, you know, a role model election in this country. | ||
| And, you know, let's, you know, we need to tell Joe Biden, you know, to embrace the ideals that he's stood for, for his whole career and not end his career by, you know, tarring our country with a, with a, you know, with a rigged election. | ||
| Are you in any contact with the Democrat Party? | ||
| I mean, have you, have they specifically said, we're not gonna, I mean, I'm guessing they don't pick up your calls, right? | ||
| No, we're not in contact with them. | ||
| I mean, they've, you know, been very clear that they don't want me in this election. | ||
| I hear it from people all the time. | ||
| You know, why don't you, you know, you could hurt Joe Biden, you know, and get Trump elected. | ||
| You know, people say that to me a lot. | ||
| You know, people who are in the party or, I ran into Hillary Clinton at a dinner a couple of weeks | ||
| ago and she said something like that to me along those lines. | ||
| And you know, it's strange because most, I don't think anybody is happy with the | ||
| choices that Americans are being given right now. | ||
| And I think, you know, we need some other choices. | ||
| I'm glad Marianne Williamson is in this race. | ||
| I hope Gavin Newsom gets into it. | ||
| I think, you know, we need choices. | ||
| We can't just have a Kabuki theater. | ||
| I have to. | ||
| We need a real, you know, we're supposed to be, the Democrats are supposed to be the party of the New Deal, | ||
| not the party of the rig deal. | ||
| And that's- I have to, my audience will go crazy | ||
| if I don't say something though about Gavin Newsom, because he, to me, is exactly why I'm no longer a Democrat. | ||
| The reason I literally fled California because of him, high taxes, endless regulation, | ||
| lockdowns, keeping his winery open. | ||
| Like, so I'm with you that you need a diverse, broad coalition of people and different ideas and all that stuff. | ||
| But that guy, I just, I would be remiss if I did not say that. | ||
| But I love that because that's what I want to run. | ||
| I want to have that discussion with him. | ||
| I want to sit on a stage. | ||
| And say exactly what you just said, because, you know, we should involve the working people involved in this debate. | ||
| You know, I want people I don't agree with. | ||
| And I also want to show that we can have a civil discussion with each other, even though, you know, even though we have these profound disagreements. | ||
| You know, there's nobody who disagrees more with the way that Gavin Newsom ran the COVID operation. | ||
| And, you know, I was in San Francisco this week, and I spent, I guess, almost nine months in San Francisco during the Monsanto trials. | ||
| So, you know, I got to know the city really well and love the city. | ||
| And the courthouse is near enough Union Square that I could walk down to Union Square every morning. | ||
| Union Square, for people who don't know San Francisco, is like the Fifth Avenue of San Francisco. | ||
| It's where all the shops, you know, Armani and Nordstrom's and Banana Republic and Gap and And all of these, you know, powerful, iconic American corporations and the showcase of American retail might is right there, you know, Levi's and and and all of the and it is it is Fifth Avenue West. | ||
| And I went down there three weeks ago and every one of those shops is closed. | ||
| Every one of them. | ||
| And, you know, these are huge buildings and giant malls and retail and they're just closed. | ||
| They're boarded up because they, you know, they just let them languish during these lockdowns that just destroyed the city. | ||
| There's a 30-35% vacancy rate. | ||
| Then there's no way that they're, you know, I don't even understand any conception of how they can bring that city back. | ||
| You need somebody, I don't know, you need some very, very powerful dynamic character | ||
| who can come in and convince these retailers that the policies are gonna change | ||
| and that they can take a risk on San Francisco again. | ||
| And that's all Gavin Newsom. | ||
| And I wanna talk to him about that. | ||
| I wanna talk on a stage about what, do you think that's good for America? | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of the people that now are refusing to talk to you? | ||
| Because, look, I'm with you. | ||
| I would love for you to have that conversation with Newsom. | ||
| I think he's, I mean, he destroyed San Francisco as mayor, as you're pointing out, and then he destroyed the state, in essence, California as governor. | ||
| But, you know, it's not just him. | ||
| I mean, you know, Jake Tapper went on CNN, what was it, about 10 days ago, and said he would not have you on the show because of your dangerous misinformation. | ||
| There was obviously this famous thing with Dr. Peter Hotez on, you know, telling Rogan that he'll no longer do the show and he won't debate you. | ||
| By the way, I then had Brett Weinstein and Jay Bhattacharya offer to debate Hotez. | ||
| He won't debate them either. | ||
| But this notion that you're out there saying, hey, I'll talk to you guys, and now they've framed you as, oh, he's untouchable, as if something you've said is so crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean if you can't debate it, it's not science. | ||
| The science is rooted in reason and logic and scientists are supposed to be able to subject themselves to the furnace of debate. | ||
| And, you know, allow their ideas to triumph in the mud, to become annealed in debate, and then to triumph and rise in the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| And if you can't do that, I mean, they say, well, because I'm a fraud, and a quack, and a charlatan, and all the other, you know, things that they say about me, that, you know, you can't debate somebody like that. | ||
| Well, that's a bunch of, first of all, You know, I've won hundreds and hundreds of cases by arguing in front of juries. | ||
| And, you know, with people who, if I was making these kind of, you know, absurd claims that, you know, if I was the kind of person that was making those kind of claims that were baseless, that the other attorneys in those cases would chew me up and spit me out and humiliate me in front of the jury, because that's what we are trained to do. | ||
| And so, you know, I, Hotez told the truth one time with Rogan. | ||
| Two or three years ago, Rogin said, why don't you debate Bobby Kennedy? | ||
| And he said, well, he's a cunning lawyer and, you know, I'm not trained with debate. | ||
| Well, you know, every scientist is, is you look at what Darwin did and what, you know, and even like Archimedes and, you know, all of the Galileo and all these, they had to defend their ideas. | ||
| I mean, there are forums set up all over the world where scientists get together and, you know, and debate each other. | ||
| And those debates are, are vicious and they're, and they're open them very, very high stakes debate, and they're, and they use every trick but that's part of being a scientist is you take your ideas and you and you give them and you know the way that | ||
| What I would do with Hota is that I really have a lot of domain knowledge about vaccine studies. | ||
| You know, I've written books about them. | ||
| I've assembled them. | ||
| And so I would, you know, my way of debating would be asking him, showing him the studies and saying, you know, how can you explain this? | ||
| If what you're saying is true, show me your study. | ||
| Either way. | ||
| I've had private debates with Otis. | ||
| I've probably spent, I don't know, 10 or 20 hours with him, because a few years ago, somebody asked me, somebody with whom I was very close, told me they were going to come out publicly against me with vaccination, and this person is very wired in NIH, and I said, before you do that, Put me in a room with a guy who knows more about vaccines than anybody in the world and you listen to me debate them and then make up your mind about whether or not you want to go public against me. | ||
| And so he called Francis Collins. | ||
| And Francis Collins and Tony Fauci. | ||
| And they didn't want to do it, but they said the guy to do it is Peter Hotez. | ||
| He is their, you know, their champion. | ||
| He's their Goliath. | ||
| And so, Hotez did a series of phone calls with me and this other individual. | ||
| And let me just say this, the individual did not come out publicly against me after listening to those debates. | ||
| But we then had a lot of email exchanges where I would say, show me the study that shows that any of the vaccines given the first six months of life don't cause autism. | ||
| He ended up sending me 11 studies about the MMR vaccine, which does not fit in that category. | ||
| And the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, those studies don't exist. | ||
| I showed him those papers. | ||
| You know, I don't think his fear is that I would say something that was sort of crazy and detached from reality. | ||
| I think his fear is that I would expose reality. | ||
| Right, I mean, that's the point. | ||
| It's not like you're some random kook on the street. | ||
| It's like, if you were saying crazy things, you should be able to debunk them. | ||
| Let's hit a couple other topics. | ||
| The affirmative action decision came out a week or so ago from the Supreme Court. | ||
| And, you know, I've been on board so much of what you're saying, even though, as I said, I don't consider myself a Democrat. | ||
| I moved to Florida. | ||
| It's the first time I've ever registered as a Republican since I've been here in Florida. | ||
| But I saw your tweet thread about the affirmative action decision, and basically you were against the decision. | ||
| And I was hoping maybe you could just walk us through the philosophy there. | ||
| Yeah, and I understand why people, you know, differ about that with me, and a lot of the people who have supported me on other issues would be disappointed by that. | ||
| But, you know, Listen, I grew up in a state that was a Jim Crow state. | ||
| Oh, when I grew up in Virginia, it was illegal at that time for a black man to marry a white woman. | ||
| Every aspect of life was governed by considerations of race. | ||
| You were identified by black on your birth certificate. | ||
| You were raised in a black neighborhood. | ||
| You attended black segregated schools. | ||
| Transportation, public parks, everything, every aspect, you were identified by race. | ||
| On your dad's certificate and buried in a black cemetery. | ||
| I had a guy that was a guy who worked for my family and I from when I was young I was going hunting and trapping hawks down in the southern part of Virginia and he would carry me on those trips. | ||
| And he had been a World War II vet. | ||
| He was in the Seabees. | ||
| He was six foot five. | ||
| Incredibly smart. | ||
| And when we stopped at restaurants, I would have to go in and buy the food and bring it out so that the two of us could eat it in the car. | ||
| He asked me one day to accompany him into the local shoe store, because he was not allowed in the shoe store. | ||
| I had to buy the shoes from him, bring them outside, and he had to try them on the curb. | ||
| Oh, you know, when I and my family was, you know, deeply involved in the civil rights movement, and, and, you know, a lot of people look at affirmative action say, well, you know, it's been, it's been 100, 150 years since the Civil War. | ||
| You know, people that had black Americans had time to recover. | ||
| But you know, I was, you know, I saw what it was like to be black when I was a kid. | ||
| I saw that, you know, at all of those higher levels of society were forbidden, right, you know, in my lifetime. | ||
| My family was deeply involved in ending that system of Jim Crow. | ||
| And part of that process was doing something that normally I wouldn't believe in, which is allowing considerations of race. | ||
| to affect the judgments about who gets these positions in colleges. | ||
| And almost all of those colleges already have a system of preference. | ||
| And the system of preference is for legacies, you know, for people like me who had a grandfather who went to Harvard, a father who went to Harvard, uncles that went there. | ||
| And so it's much easier for me to get in. | ||
| But all of those legacies and also the offspring of faculty. | ||
| are given preferences. And if you look at a pie chart, who's in almost none of those | ||
| kids are black. So this is kind of a way of counterbalancing that. And it's not, you know, | ||
| believe me, I have a lot of problems with it too. And let me tell you what the problems | ||
| are that I see with affirmative action is one. | ||
| It's just contrary to American values that, you know, we're a meritocracy. | ||
| It's an illusion, though, as I say that we're a meritocracy because there are all these built-in biases and preferences. | ||
| But also, I think that the bigger problem Is what Barack Obama calls, you know, the subtle bigotry of low expectations that, you know, people, a black kid in a college, in a good college, that people are looking at that kid and saying, oh, he got in here because he got a preference. | ||
| And I don't think that's good for America either. | ||
| So I understand that, you know, I think the Supreme Court has made a decision that debate is now over about affirmative action. | ||
| We're moving on and we're going to, you know, try to preserve the beachhead that black Americans got during that period in faculty positions, in business positions, etc. | ||
| But for me, I would say that we probably should have kept it in place for a few more years, but it's over now. | ||
| Right, I get the intentions. | ||
| Just one more on that. | ||
| What would you say in that case to the kid, the, say, 16 or 17-year-old Asian kid who scored perfect on his SATs and had all As, and he knows he's not getting into Harvard because someone with significantly less I agree with that. | ||
| is gonna get in, no one gave that Asian kid anything. | ||
| He might be second American from South Korea and his parents owned a bodega. | ||
| That was a lot of kids that I grew up around. | ||
| I mean, what do you say to that kid? | ||
| I think that's what the nugget really comes down to here. | ||
| Yeah, I agree with that. | ||
| I think that's a, it's a, you know, it's not an easy position on any side to take, | ||
| but, you know, as far as that Asian kid goes, there's kids getting into that college | ||
| because they're good at sports. | ||
| Who don't have that kind of academic discipline or academic performance record. | ||
| There's all kinds of biases that get certain people in and it's not a straight meritocracy. | ||
| There's no college. | ||
| There are very few colleges in this country. | ||
| I'm not going to say no. | ||
| Just look at your GPA. | ||
| And your test scores and say that the top 3,000 kids with the best test scores in the country are the kids that are going to get into this college. | ||
| All the decisions are dripping with bias of one kind or another. | ||
| And unfortunately, the bias, you know, these studies show that the biases tend to reflect The racial composition of the admissions department. | ||
| People tend to favor people who look like them and give them a preference. | ||
| A lot of the admissions departments didn't have black people in them. | ||
| them. And so, you know, that's, it's not an easy question, Dave. It's not one that I, | ||
| you know, I'm, it's one that's inconsistent with a lot of my other values and ideas about | ||
| the country, but, you know, because of my background and, and I, you know, I land on | ||
| that side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yeah, I think that's as honest an answer as you can give. | ||
| Personally, I happen to disagree, but that's just fine. | ||
| That's the point of all of this. | ||
| Let's hit a couple other things. | ||
| So Ukraine war, there seems to have been this odd flip amongst the parties. | ||
| When I was growing up, again, as a Democrat in New York, and my family, we all considered ourselves JFK Democrats, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ed Koch, probably many of the You know, people that you literally grew up around, but that you're ideological heroes as well. | ||
| The Democrats were sort of the anti-war party. | ||
| That was at least the notion, and it was the Republicans and the neocons who then wanted to nation-build and all of these things. | ||
| We seem to have had a flip on that, and I get there are plenty of Republicans that are for this Ukraine war as well, but it does seem to be being driven more by the Democrat Party, at least because Biden is in office. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| Well, first off, I guess, do you think that's a fair Yeah, and it's getting to a crazy point right now where we're now, you know, the Biden administration a year ago said that when they were called upon to send cluster bombs to Israel, the Biden administration, Jen Psaki said, use cluster bombs as a war crime. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yesterday, President Biden announced that they're sending cluster bombs to Russia. | ||
| And meanwhile, they're telling the American people that we're winning the war. | ||
| Cluster bombs are a last resort weapon. | ||
| And they're saying they have to send them because they've run out of other weapons. | ||
| So what is actually happening? | ||
| Why are we being lied to? | ||
| Clearly, we're being lied to. | ||
| But now you have this split. | ||
| And by the way, The driving force behind wars in this country have been a group of people called the neocons that are embedded in the State Department from the top to the bottom. | ||
| It's absolutely pervasive in the State Department. | ||
| And they were, you know, a lot of them were driven out because they, after the Iraq War, they, you know, they published Their manifesto in the late 1990s, it was called The Project for a New American Century, and this outlined their plans for the world. | ||
| And what they said is that America had won the Cold War, and as the victor, it was our privilege. | ||
| run the world for at least a century. | ||
| It would be the American century, a project for a new American century. | ||
| And that we should accomplish this feat through the use of our superior military power and through violence. | ||
| And it outlined eight countries that needed to be overthrown, including Iraq. | ||
| And then shortly after that publication of that, the neocons in the White House who surrounded President George W. Bush You know, defrauded us into the Iraq war by saying there were weapons of mass destruction and suggesting, you know, falsely that Saddam had something to do with the 9-11 attack. | ||
| That war cost us, in the end, about eight trillion dollars. | ||
| We left Iraq worse than we found it. | ||
| We killed more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein. | ||
| The country is now in an incoherent, you know, battle between Shia and Sunni death squads. | ||
| We push Iraq into a proxy posture with Iran, which is, you know, exactly the foreign policy outcome that we were trying to avoid for 40 years. | ||
| We created ISIS. | ||
| We drove two million refugees into Europe, which destabilized all the nations in Europe for, you know, the next probably century. | ||
| I mean, what's happening in France with Iraq, with the riots today, is a direct result of our intervention in Iraq and Syria. | ||
| Brexit, it was an outcome, it was a blowback from our intervention in Iraq and Syria. | ||
| We broke apart Europe, you know, and all of those neocons were driven out of office and we thought they would have gone from government forever. | ||
| They were pariahs, you know, they were in shame, disgrace. | ||
| But they reappeared first in the Obama administration, a few of them, And then, now they run the... | ||
| The Biden administration, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, these are key figures. | ||
| In fact, Victoria Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, was the author of Project for a New American Century, that document that I referred to. | ||
| And they're the ones who have orchestrated this Ukraine war. | ||
| Their vision was that they've always wanted to dismantle and balkanize Russia. | ||
| and run Russia and be able to devour its natural resources, you know, have US companies and exploiting the oil, etc. | ||
| So they believe that Russia was weak militarily and, and that Putin was weak. | ||
| They were mistaken. | ||
| And they said, they felt like if we punish Russia with these draconian sanctions, the economy would implode. | ||
| It would destabilize the country. | ||
| They would overthrow Putin and whoever replaced Putin, no matter if they were more nationalists, more violent, it wouldn't matter because Putin himself was the guy that was holding Russia together. | ||
| And they had to get rid of him because then it was the whole Russia, you know, Russian enterprise would fall apart. | ||
| And they, you know, they say in Brzezinski's book, etc., they say again and again and again, we got to draw Russia into a war like we did in Afghanistan, and expose its military, and it's best to draw them to a war against NATO, because then we can deploy all of NATO forces against them, we can expose the weakness of the Russian army in the Russian state, there'll be an ousting of Putin, etc. | ||
| This was their plan. | ||
| You know, Putin did not want to go into Ukraine. | ||
| We now know that's clear. | ||
| He wanted to sign the Minsk Accords. | ||
| Even when Dombas and Lukas voted to leave Ukraine, he said no. | ||
| They voted 90 to 10 to leave. | ||
| He said, no, you stay part of Ukraine, but let's make a deal to protect you from the violence of the government that the U.S. | ||
| installed in Ukraine in 2014. | ||
| And let's keep NATO out of the Ukraine, which was the existential threat that they were most frightened about. | ||
| The US kept saying, we're going to put NATO into the Ukraine. | ||
| We're going to violate all of our promises not to do that. | ||
| And we torpedoed the Minsk Accords. | ||
| France agreed to it. | ||
| Germany agreed to it. | ||
| Russia agreed to it. | ||
| Zelensky ran. | ||
| In 2019, saying that anyone, 70% of a comedian, wins with no political experience. | ||
| It's like, David, you ran for president promising peace and because... God help us all. | ||
| You got elected and then you changed your mind. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| Something changed his mind. | ||
| Clearly, he was threatened with murder by nationalists, ultranationalists within the Ukrainian government, and threatened with a cutoff by Victoria Nuland, the people, you know, the neocons in the White House and the State Department. | ||
| So then, what we now know is that in April of 2022, they signed a peace agreement modeled on the Minsk Accords. | ||
| Putin signed it, and Zelensky signed it. | ||
| And the Russians were acting in good faith by withdrawing all their forces from the Ukraine. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| We send, the White House sends Boris Johnson over there to torpedo that agreement. | ||
| So we wanted this war and we wanted it for something that had nothing to do with Ukraine. | ||
| Well, now The neocons are getting cold feet, and there is division within the neocons. | ||
| Richard Haass, who's one of the oldest neocons, is now saying, you know, the Biden administration is sending cluster bombs. | ||
| They're going to try to leg Ukraine into NATO. | ||
| What's going to happen then? | ||
| Right, then we're bound. | ||
| Then what will really happen, Dave, is this. | ||
| We then have to, then NATO is going to throw Russia out of the Ukraine, including Crimea. | ||
| Russia will never leave. | ||
| It would be like us being defeated by Mexico. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| You saw, I mean, you remember what happened to Stalingrad, the sacrifice the Russians were willing to make during World War II. | ||
| The Russians are unbeatable. | ||
| They're killing Ukrainians right now at a 7 to 1 ratio. | ||
| We've killed 350,000 Ukrainians completely unnecessarily. | ||
| They're butchering. | ||
| We've turned that country into an abattoir of death with a flower of Ukrainian youth. | ||
| But now, if we let them into NATO, the defeat that they've now suffered, now all of NATO is going to go in there. | ||
| But here's what really is going to happen. | ||
| Many of the NATO countries are going to refuse. | ||
| Greece will never go to war against Russia. | ||
| It'll be us, in essence. | ||
| And what it will do is it will expose Title 5, which is the agreement that if one of them goes to war, they all have to go to war. | ||
| It will expose that as a paper tiger and all of NATO then will fall apart. | ||
| So the neocons in the White House are now divided because some of them, the smarter ones, are terrified that this will be the end of NATO. | ||
| And so they're now saying, you know, they're now telling President Biden you can't Let Ukraine into NATO and you know, who knows what he's going to do because who knows how much of these decision-making is actually taking place in Joe Biden's brain and how much of it is just being told to him, you know, do this, do that. | ||
| And it's unclear because I would say I would say it's probably very, very little in Joe Biden's brain. | ||
| So let me just let's just follow up on that. | ||
| And then I just have one more for you. | ||
| And then we're good. | ||
| So what would you do? | ||
| I mean, how? | ||
| So now it's January 25. | ||
| What what are you doing on day one to make sure that this thing doesn't escalate and negotiate a peace with Putin? | ||
| You know, it's our war. | ||
| It's a proxy war between the US and Russia, and I'll negotiate a peace. | ||
| And of course, the Ukrainians will be part of that. | ||
| And, you know, but let's negotiate a peace. | ||
| Putin's wanted to negotiate from the beginning. | ||
| We haven't talked to the Russians for at least six months. | ||
| Why are we talking to them every day? | ||
| And by the way, these neocons like Richard Haass are secretly talking to the Russian leadership because they want to get out of there now. | ||
| They understand that they made a huge, huge mistake. | ||
| We do polling over there. | ||
| The U.S. | ||
| firms do polling and our government does polling. | ||
| And those polls are showing an extraordinary popularity. | ||
| Putin is now stronger than ever. | ||
| He's got 90% popularity and approval ratings among the Russian people. | ||
| They have not weakened him. | ||
| They've strengthened him. | ||
| And the Russian people are resolved and they are not going to lose this war. | ||
| I want to ask you just one other thing, because people have heard you talk about some of the reasons you like Trump and some of the reasons you dislike Trump, and obviously you've laid out here some of your frustrations with Biden and the Democrat Party. | ||
| But the one other guy that seems to be in the mix here, I don't know that I've heard you talk about at all, actually, is DeSantis. | ||
| He's a huge reason why I moved my family and two companies here to Florida, and I see what the results of governing right are. | ||
| I see you guys sort of lined up on COVID. | ||
| I see you kind of lined up on the agencies, certainly on the border. | ||
| I saw the video you did at our, you know, the wall in Mexico, just watching hundreds of people from, as you said, dozens of countries just walk right through. | ||
| I'm wondering, do you see any touch points there? | ||
| And what maybe are the chasms there that I'm not seeing? | ||
| Well, I thought what he did during COVID was really, you know, real leadership. | ||
| He broke with the dominant theology and he did exactly what a leader should do. | ||
| He contacted the best scientists in the world, the scientists from Stanford, from Harvard, from Oxford. | ||
| He flew them into Florida and had them sit down and say, what actually should we be doing? | ||
| And, you know, he asked the right questions, and I think, you know, Florida ended up with a much better record than any of the other states, even though Florida has this population, you know, the most vulnerable population, because it has, you know, a lot of seniors, a disproportionate number of seniors in Florida, and yet they still did a lot better than, you know, particularly comparable states, high states like California, with many fewer seniors. | ||
| And so I thought he did really well in that. | ||
| Um, I, uh, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I feel like some of the, um, the stuff that he's done since then has kind of a mean side to it. | ||
| Um, and, uh, which I don't, I don't like that. | ||
| It feels a little, it feels like bullying, but I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I, you know, my, my, I I've talked, I've met with him twice. | ||
| And both of our meetings were very, very friendly. | ||
| And I really, really like his wife, Casey. | ||
| I think she's fantastic. | ||
| And so, you know, I guess things to think about and more to be seen. | ||
| Robert, I will leave you with this, because I say it on the show whenever we play your clips, that if the Democrats will not put you on that debate stage, I don't know if it's too late, but I have a feeling that the Republicans would. | ||
| So, either way, I wish you a lot of luck, and I thank you for taking the time. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless dribble, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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