Dave Rubin critiques the "Barbie" movie's anti-male messaging and Florida's Stop WOKE Act, defending Governor Ron DeSantis against claims that the curriculum whitewashes slavery by citing specific modules on mortality and resistance contributed by Dr. William B. Allen and Dr. Francis Presley Rice. He counters media narratives labeling PragerU as anti-immigrant while highlighting its focus on border integrity, and concludes by analyzing Charlie Kirk's warning about base fears regarding DeSantis versus Donald Trump, ultimately arguing that DeSantis's cautious leadership contrasts sharply with Trump's divisive rhetoric. [Automatically generated summary]
Is there any sort of work being done to you with the airlines in order to get flights actually on time or not delayed as much?
Just curious if there's any work happening there.
Yes.
So we've seen almost a doubling in terms of improvement on on-time performance since last year.
That is a reflection of all the work that we've done across the ecosystem together with our partner airlines, with agencies, reducing processing time, reducing wait times, And fine-tuning operations with our air carrier partners.
and we see the great results that have come from that.
The theme for today's program, which I did know about, is a bit about this Barbie divide happening in the country.
But fear not, I'm not going to belabor you with everything going on with Barbie and focus on Barbie and all that.
We'll do a little Barbieness.
But I think Barbie and the culture wars and the woke versus the sane people And the destruction of old stories, like I talked about yesterday.
Snow White.
If you don't like the story of the guy kissing the princess and living happily ever after, instead of destroying that story, how about you create a new story?
If you don't like whatever it is Barbie was all about, big boobs and a genderless dude or whatever, Barbie with her car, then create a new story.
But they like to burn down everything and that's what the machine is good at
destroying anything that Americans can broadly agree on and then giving us
Remakes that just make us hate each other and then we're gonna connect that to a whole bunch of politics including
The big thing going on here in Florida because today is a day that ends in the letter Y
Which means the entire machine is going after Florida going after DeSantis
Claiming that we are not teaching slavery correctly in our schools and a whole bunch more.
And of course, when I saw the headline on this a few days ago, without even having to read the articles, I knew it was complete nonsense.
But that didn't stop Kamala Harris from getting on a plane and flying to Florida and telling everyone how racist this place is and all of the mainstream media.
and all that. And then we'll do a bit on Trump and DeSantis because some of you saw this I'm sure,
but I went on Charlie Kirk's show yesterday. Charlie Kirk of course from Turning Point USA.
Charlie's a friend of mine. We've done dozens and dozens of public events over the years.
We're in different spots when it comes to Trump and DeSantis, but we got into it in an interesting,
I would say in an interesting and respectful way with completely different perspectives.
And we don't see too much of that these days, do we?
Whether it's a Democrat versus a Republican in a respectful manner, or even, let's say, two people that are going to vote Republican, me and Charlie, having an honest discussion about why we're supporting one candidate or the other.
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And now, back to me.
Okay, so when we were setting up the show this morning, and Phoenix said to me, Dave,
let's cover a little bit of what's going on with this Barbie situation, and everyone's
freaking out about Barbie, we had a little back and forth.
Because I was saying, I don't want to always, just because something happens culturally,
and everyone's freaking out.
I don't want to always add into the freakout, right?
I'm trying to give you guys solutions on this show.
But sometimes things happen that I would say are so culturally impactful, whether we like it or not, that we have to address it.
So I am going to talk about Barbie for a moment.
We're going to show you a clip of the movie.
I did not see the movie.
As I said yesterday, I am an adult.
I did not see Barbie over the weekend.
I did watch Flash Gordon, but that's a little bit different, obviously.
But, I'm going to show you a clip, but I'm not telling you all of this to outrage you.
I just want to show you how a certain set of people are trying to push a certain set of ideas, and then, really on the other side of that, how we can fight back in a better, more functional way.
So here is Ken.
You know who's the actor on this one?
It's Ryan Gosling, if I'm not mistaken.
Ryan Gosling, as Ken, singing about blonde fragility in the new Barbie movie.
unidentified
I just don't know who I am without you.
You're Ken.
But it's Barbie and Ken.
There is no just Ken.
Doesn't seem to matter what I do.
I'm always number two.
No one knows how hard I tried.
Oh, I, I have feelings that I can't explain.
Driving me insane.
All my life been so polite.
Cause I'm just kidding.
Anywhere else I'd be a kid.
Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?
I'm just Ken, where I see the love she sees a friend.
What will it take for her to see the man behind the trend and fight for me?
I'm just Ken, and I'm enough, and I'm great at doing stuff.
All right, so first off, I want to just reiterate, I am not here to make you outraged by that.
I don't think you should have been outraged by that.
I think there's obviously, and we just all agreed on it in this room, and I think I'm sitting here with three heterosexuals as far as I know, there was something visually interesting about that.
Is there anything you guys want to tell me about your sexuality real quick?
That's a reference from last week if you're paying attention.
Anyway, there's something visually interesting about that.
But the point I'm showing you on this, and then we'll get to sort of the outrage machine around it, is that here you have, what they've done is they've flipped, which is just fine, they've flipped what the traditional thing is, right?
Here is the guy now saying, I'm not complete without the girl.
And again, there's something visually interesting.
The song wasn't terrible.
But now there's this giant culture war raging around this.
I thought The Daily Wire had a nice piece that summed this up quite well.
Early reviewers praised the film as being pro-feminist and anti-patriarchy.
Gerwig, that's the director, has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry even if you're made of plastic, Entertainment Weekly reporter Devin Kogan wrote.
The writer goes on to describe how in Barbie land the women run the show while the Ken dolls always play a supporting role.
But then stereotypical Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, starts to unravel mentally when she starts thinking about deeper issues such as death and realizes her arched feet have gone flat.
She ventures into the real world to figure out what's going on.
Once Barbie and Ken Ryan Gosling begin rollerblading around LA, however, they both realize that they've essentially entered a mirror dimension.
Where are the female presidents, the CEOs, the astronauts?
Gerwig tackles the doll's complicated legacy head-on, exploring how Barbie's reputation here isn't one of leadership or creativity, but of corporatized objectification.
Barbie herself is horrified, facing crude comments and misogyny for the first time in her plastic life.
The EW review also notes that Gosling, as Ken, becomes enamored with the idea of being the boss and tries to bring that power structure back to Barbie land.
To Ken, this newfound idea of patriarchy is intoxicating, and he quickly enters a spiral of masculinity, luxuriating in trucks, cowboy's hats, and the addictive thrill of power, the reviewer writes.
He says of the film, Greta Gerwig loads plenty of food for thought in a hot pink pop fantasia.
Poking fun at patriarchy and corporate parent Mattel in her treatment of the iconic Girls Can Do Anything doll.
In Barbie Land, Ken's job is a deliberately ill-defined afterthought, basically just beach.
Whereas in the real world, dudes rule, an idea he takes back to Barbie land with pointedly
absurd results, brainwashing all the women into behaving like obedient housewives, he
shares later in the review.
So this is connected to what I talked about yesterday, that instead of creating new characters
to do all of these new things, whether it's Snow White, whether it's Star Wars, whether
it's Barbie, whether it's Marvel, if you want to change all of these new things, if
you want to change the history, the lore of these characters, if you want to change their
sexuality, their gender, their skin color, Little Mermaid, all of these things, if you
want to do all that, that is just fine.
That is what dreamers dream of, right?
Writing new stories, creating new characters, new tensions, new worlds, new ideas.
That's once what the great legendary writers did when they created Say Star Wars, or they created Lord of the Rings, or they created anything that you watch that is a fictitious something, a love story or whatever else.
But instead what we do right now is the corporate world takes old properties that were just fine in and of themselves.
Well, the point is, guys, that the woke thing, like you can see, again, I'm not enraged by this, if you want to see Barbie, go see Barbie, okay, fine, yada, yada, yada, but the woke thing, that destructive force has permeated throughout society everywhere.
So now I want to connect it to something politically that's happening, of course, right here in
the free state of Florida, because the flames of the woke, they end up burning everything
down.
One of the things that's happening right now is Florida is being attacked.
Well, the Department of Education in Florida specifically, and of course that means Ron
DeSantis, are being attacked because they are claiming that somehow we are not teaching
black history correctly, that we are not teaching about slavery correctly, and much more.
Again, I want to reiterate that when I saw this story just a headline a couple days ago, I knew we'd cover it on the show in the next couple days, but I didn't even bother clicking because I was like, it's so obviously nonsensical.
That there's no point addressing it.
So my hope was it was going to just go away.
Of course it did not.
unidentified
Here is CBS News.
they're a very serious corporate press organization covering this very serious and real story.
...controversy over Florida's new education standards after Governor Ron DeSantis signed
a bill called the Stop WOKE Act last year. The changes include teaching middle schoolers
that some enslaved people actually benefited from slavery because it taught them skills.
Nancy Cordes is following all of this at the White House.
Good morning, Nancy.
Yes, this debate may have started in Florida, but it has now landed squarely in the middle of the presidential race.
Governor DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed.
unidentified
The new standards say Florida students should be taught about the harsh conditions slaves endured, but also about how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
Now, first off, I just want to address one thing about the skills issue, because that's what seems to be, everyone seems to be hung up on this skills thing.
You know, there is an uncomfortable truth related to this.
No one is defending the horrors, absolute horrors of slavery.
A human being has no right to own another human being.
And in the United States of America, we fought a civil war very close to our inception to eliminate slavery.
Slavery existed long before the United States.
Slavery was not one of the founding principles of the United States.
All of those things.
The simple truth, and we'll get to the way they're exaggerating all of this nonsense, is that if you attained some skill, however you attained it, It's still a skill.
So if you were a blacksmith on the plantation, you were able to take that skill out.
You didn't immediately become an accountant the day slavery was over.
That is no defense of slavery whatsoever.
And I have no doubt the Media Matter losers are watching this right now, waiting for me to say it in some way that they can selectively edit.
But there is a truth to that.
You could make the same argument.
And here we go.
I mean, I know it's going to happen already.
But in the work camps, right, in World War II Nazi work camps, they used, they took people that had certain skills to do certain things, to build buildings and do engineering, horrible things.
You might have learned some skills there.
It doesn't mean any of it's good, none of it's good, none of it's...
None of it's just, but it doesn't change a certain degree of reality.
But, of course, I'm going to unpack why this is all nonsense, but let's just do one more thing.
This is a political reporter, Eugene Daniels, really explaining, again, this is sort of the hysteria around this.
This is mostly because white kids feel uncomfortable about reality.
His teaching is from the Florida new curriculum there, but also how Governor DeSantis and his anti-wolf policies have put him in a box with us speaking to a seemingly smaller and smaller portion of the electorate.
This is what happens when you base your entire kind of political career on this. When you say that everybody needs to be
anti-wolf, that's where, this is where you end up. And when you talk to folks in Florida,
the whole point of the bill that came through, this is in reaction to a bill that he
wanted, it was making clear what he wanted to folks. And it's because he felt, and a
lot of people around this country are starting to feel, that we can't teach the correct
history of this country because it makes white kids uncomfortable.
That is at the base of this, right?
That it is uncomfortable to hear that people that look like you put people that look like me in chains and made them do things and beat them and rape them.
That is uncomfortable for kids to hear.
That is what these folks are saying.
But then when you use that as a political cudgel, You have to own it, right?
At this point, this is on Ron DeSantis.
He may not have created these policies with the school board, but at the end of the day, he made it very clear to what he wanted to the folks in this.
Okay, everything he said there is complete nonsense, and if he wants to teach, oh, kid, fourth grader, fifth grader, sixth grader, whatever it might be, People who look like you did this to people who look like me.
Thus, we must have equity, right?
Thus, I must get a job instead of you.
Thus, I must get into the college instead of you.
That's the world that that guy wants to live in, right?
That's the world that the Supreme Court just struck down the decision to allow affirmative action as it relates to getting into colleges.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court did the right thing because we don't want systemic racism.
The idea that DeSantis is doing something because white kids are nervous about hearing reality, no, it's not true.
But before I get to any of that, I'm just going to lay out more of the way the media are treating this versus reality.
We'll get to reality, I promise you.
Here's Whoopi Goldberg completely lying about the thing.
Trying to get through everything that's happened over the weekend and what's all the insanity going on in the world like Wednesday Florida's Board of Education approved What they're calling standards for African-American history.
I feel like they didn't talk to any African-Americans because we could have told them about the history and nor have anyone seemingly gone to the Smithsonian.
We're telling you this history.
It's our American history because you need to know so we don't repeat it.
And here you come, DeSantis, trying to repeat it.
Well, you know what?
As long as the Smithsonian is standing, as long as there are books, as long as there are families, because remember, we didn't have books.
All these stories come to us from our families.
You don't call our families liars.
They know what happened because their grandmas, grandmas, grandmas, grandmas told them.
You, sir, are, you are, I can't even say the word.
I've heard from multiple sources you show up to that show stoned every day.
I don't know what the high hell you're talking about.
DeSantis is not trying to reinstitute slavery or teach anyone that slavery didn't exist or anything like that.
But you flat out lied when she said that they should have talked to some black scholars about this.
Because two of the scholars that were on the board who put this whole curriculum together, and by the way, we're going to read you some of the curriculum and link to it down below.
You will find it.
Is it in the description already?
Yeah, it's in the description already if you're watching this video right now.
We've already linked to it.
Don't read it while I'm telling you about it.
But yes, there are two scholars who are black.
They are African American, Dr. William B. Allen and Dr. Francis Presley Rice.
So everything you just said there was complete nonsense.
And speaking of complete nonsense, The View actually had to cut a portion of Anna Navarro's insane diatribe we're about to show you because she was using some foul language.
I have been spitting mad about the culture wars that Ron DeSantis has been creating.
So when he says that he has nothing to do with it...
blackies and minions to put that legislation into effect.
He has created the environment that has led to this. How dare you shame on
you people in Florida!
How dare you try to whitewash slavery and to the Commissioner of Education in
Florida, Manny Diaz, a Cuban-American, that is like saying that there's a
redeeming quality to Cuban political prisoners under Castro.
When you don't have freedom, you don't have anything.
And for this man, Ron DeSantis, who apparently his only skill that he has acquired is lying and creating culture wars that he thinks are going to make him president.
I reached out to DeSantis' team this weekend, honestly in hopes that there was some decent explanation here, and basically what I got from them was, well, there were some black educators and scholars who contributed to this, and it's been on the books for over a decade.
Well, a lot of things have been on the books for over a decade that shouldn't be, and they're bad, and they're terrible.
My friend Will Hurd, I think, said it better than I could have, which was, it was literally the most dehumanizing institution, subjugated people as property because they lacked any basic rights and freedoms.
This is Ron DeSantis doing what I wanted to think there was better to him, but I wonder I'm realizing there's not.
She's not doing it to debunk Whoopi, but she's going on their train, their train of lies.
Let's continue with the train of lies, because the thing that really lit this on fire was that Vice President Kamala Harris, the queen of Venn diagrams, she was very upset about this, and then she appeared in Florida.
Here's a little video of her freaking out about this thing that's not real a thing.
I have a piece of paper in front of me, and you're not going to believe this.
We've got the actual information about what's going on here.
This is from the National Review.
I'll read it to you carefully, and you'll get all of it.
I have been trying to work out how to best illustrate the sheer scale of Harris's falsehood, and I've come to the conclusion that the only way to achieve it is to list in one place all of the relevant parts of the courts about which she is complaining.
So below, I have copied and pasted every single reference to slavery, slaves, abolitionism, civil rights, and African Americans that is in the document.
For those interested, the full curriculum, including the curriculum for teaching of the Holocaust, is here.
By the way, as I just said, we've linked to it in our video that you're watching right now, so you can read the entire thing for yourself.
There is simply no way of perusing this course and concluding that it gaslights people or whitewashes slavery.
Among many, many other things, it includes sections on the conditions for Africans during their passage to America, the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, including infant mortality rates, the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations, for example, undernourishment, climate conditions, Infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved versus the free, the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations, poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease, how the South tried to prevent slaves from escaping in their efforts to end the Underground Railroad, the overwhelming death rates caused by the practice, the many ways in which Africans resisted slavery, the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms,
And the struggles faced by African American women in the 19th century as it relates to issues of suffrage, business, and access to education.
Many of these modules apply to Florida specifically.
So yes, Florida is going all in on teaching reality.
There is nothing being whitewashed or anything else.
If you do anything Anything that is remotely against the woke, they will come and try to destroy you and lie about you and it will be all the way up from the vice president, often it's the president himself, but from the VP to the harpies at The View, to CBS, to the activists online, the whole freaking thing.
Believe it or not, I am still shocked about this.
I am so shocked I may fall out of my chair as we play you this video on CNN of all places.
They had this guy by the name of Scott Jennings and he actually told the truth.
Well, it's amazing to me that how little Kamala Harris apparently has to do that she can read something on Twitter one day and be on an airplane the next to make something literally out of nothing.
This is a completely made-up deal.
I looked at the standards.
I even looked at an analysis of the standards in every instance where the word slavery or slave was used.
I even read the statement of the African-American scholars that wrote the standards, not Ron DeSantis, but the scholars.
Everybody involved in this says this is completely a fabricated issue.
And yet, look how quickly Kamala Harris jumped on it.
So the fact that this is her best moment, a fabricated matter, is pretty ridiculous in my opinion.
Dennis has become, I would say, a mentor and a bonus uncle to me.
I've done, I think, four of their Five-minute videos.
I've done a series of other things with them.
But PragerU has become an incredible idea powerhouse of sanity, taking people all over the political spectrum who are fighting radicalism, giving them a platform.
Often people who don't agree with a lot of things that, say, a traditional conservative might agree with, such as me, such as Tim Poole, such as Jordan Peterson and many others.
And allowing them to spread their ideas because there are good time-tested ideas that should flourish in a place that's set up for many people of different walks of life and different views.
Well, Florida now is once again going on offense, so it's going to be lied about on this front.
Florida will be incorporating some PragerU materials in the education system.
This is absolutely wonderful.
I want to read a quote about it from the Miami New Times.
So this is a leftist rag.
Here's how they're Framing it, which is consistent with everything else that we just showed you.
PragerU, a conservative nonprofit often criticized for downplaying systemic racism and promoting anti-immigrant theories, announced today that Florida is the first state to officially approve PragerU as an educational vendor.
A press release from the group states, this fall in schools across America, students will
be watching PragerU videos in their classrooms as states officially make PragerU an approved
educational resource.
The group claims it is partnering with as many states as possible to provide conservative
lesson plans touted as PragerU Kids in response to requests from teachers who are sick and
tired of curriculum laced with radical political agendas.
According to the press release, in the past, teachers have been disciplined, even fired, for showing PragerU videos in their classroom.
Now PragerU videos are not only being allowed in classrooms, but superintendents and education commissioners are actively encouraging teachers to use PragerU's content to educate their students, PragerU's supplemental curriculum offers an easy, cutting-edge way to teach core knowledge in subjects ranging from civics and history to entrepreneurship and financial literacy.
Governor Ron DeSantis' office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment via email. PragerU's announcement comes as
Florida adopts new academic standards for Black history classes in public schools with accordance
with the state's controversial Stop WOKE Act signed into law by DeSantis. In 2022, the
legislation restricts instruction regarding systemic racism and bars educators from teaching
that people are privileged or oppressed solely because of their race, national origin, or
Introduced in the fifth grade, the very section on slavery in Florida's Black History curriculum closely mirrors a PragerU segment in which conservative pundit Candace Owens, who is Black, reminds viewers that slavery was not invented by white people.
In response to a request for comment, the Florida Department of Education says that it reviewed PragerU Kids and determined the material aligns to Florida's revised civics and government standards.
Whew, that was a lot of reading.
Couple things I'd like to address there.
First off, Candace was right.
Slavery was not invented by white people.
And even if it was, it wouldn't make all white people bad and all black people good just inherently based on that fact.
The opening paragraph on that, Phoenix, can you give me the line on the opening paragraph on that again?
A conservative non-profit often criticized for downplaying systemic racism.
The way they're framing it is that systemic racism exists, except it doesn't, and they do videos debunking it, and actually the Supreme Court, by eliminating affirmative action, has just kneecapped systemic racism, and also the next one, and promoting anti-immigrant theories.
They don't promote anti-immigrant theories.
They promote that we should have a border, that the nation state is actually important, that some people are legal members of a society and some people are not.
So it is absolutely wonderful that PragerU will be part, whatever it is, part of the milieu of the Florida education system.
So look, if in essence, and we'll pick it up after the break, if in essence your point is, oh, I agree with virtually all of the policies and nobody has accomplished more than this guy and done everything I want to do, but there's a little bit of a marketing issue here.
I mean, I can show you plenty of videos of Trump talking about how much he loves Paul Ryan.
Now again, credit to Charlie.
He brought me on the show.
I was clearly ready to do it.
I later on read him the direct quote where Governor DeSantis says that he has spoke to Paul Ryan once since being governor and I think not once with Karl Rove since he's been governor.
I might be getting that backwards right now.
Charlie didn't have much on that.
I want to just show you one other clip in terms of what we were getting to there about There's a difference between getting the ideas right, having the right set of policies and all that, and what you're doing in terms of campaigning and making the argument against the other guy.
I will agree with you that in terms of some of the strategy of the rollout, they probably should have been more aggressive.
I do see that changing.
Look, DeSantis just went on Russell Brand last week.
He just went on CNN for the first time last week.
I think he's doing Megyn Kelly this week, if I'm not mistaken.
is that there is as I've been trying to lay out more and more and more and I will continue to and then when I go off the grid I'll get some time to gestate with it and think about it and chew it and masticate it and come back masticate I said nothing that we have to get demonetized over I know it sounded a little different um I will come back with fresh eyes on all of this.
But I think there is a way out of this nonsense.
But we have to stop the lies.
We have to stop the pure partisanship.
We have to call out the nonsense.
We have to stop burning down everything that was once good and a series of other things.
And I think we have to be honest.
An honest debate, at least those of us that are right-leaning, on what should happen in terms of this Trump-DeSantis thing.
And I want to throw back to one clip.
We've played this once or twice before, but I think he makes a great point.
This is Jordan Peterson on Piers Morgan talking about the Trump-DeSantis situation.
That's a difficult question, because it might be that it would be good for America to have whether or not Donald Trump should be president sorted out in the public sphere, debated intensely, and subject to an election.
So it might be very interesting to see him Put himself forward on the Republican ticket.
If I had my druthers, and I say this, I hope with due care, I would rather see someone like DeSantis step forward who shares some of that forthright strength, let's say, that characterizes Trump at his best, but seems to be a more cautious administrator and a less divisive figure.
We're having this fight publicly, and I think the challenge for you, the challenge for me, the challenge for everybody is find the honest arbiters within this.
Not just succumb to the trolls or whatever it might be.
And I went to Trump rallies and these are great people and all of those things.
But as I've often said, Trump, make the case for yourself.
Stop insulting their intelligence.
Like, I don't like if you're going to make everyone think that up is down and left is right and somehow DeSantis was bad on COVID and Florida was worse than New York and that he's dishonest and not loyal.
Do we want to burn it down and burn down all of our old things?
Or do we want to figure out a way that will be more honest and real, whether it's in our children's curriculum, whether it's in our entertainment or our politics?
The question is posed, and I suppose the American people will answer it.
We've got a post game show coming up in just moments at rubinreport.locals.com.
Can we find that ad that Trump put up a Fauci and we'll put that up in the post game.
We're going to see if we can grab that one.
We've got a Obama Bud Light cold close for you in moments and your questions coming up on the other side.