Dave Rubin dissects the "new intellectual dark web," uniting Tucker Carlson, Ice Cube, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr. against a corporate media machine he claims suppresses free speech. The episode contrasts their opposition to mainstream narratives with clips of Sean Hannity platforming RFK Jr., while critiquing Alyssa Farah's defense of the Barbie movie and debunking Donald Trump's false collusion claims against Ron DeSantis. Ultimately, Rubin argues the conflict transcends left-right politics, framing it as a struggle between truth-seekers and elites manipulating reality to maintain control over public discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
I don't know what the high hell you're talking about because two of the scholars that were on the board who put this whole curriculum together are black.
He has done literally everything that anyone right-leaning could believe in.
As you know, we have a post-game show, as always, at RubinReport.locals.com, and I am super psyched for today's show.
I enjoy what I do for a living, but today I feel like we can sort of birth a new alliance, because I sense something is forming.
It's something that we hit on mostly on Monday and then touched on a bit yesterday.
But some of you that have been watching me for a long time, you remember the phrase, I have not said it in a couple of years, the intellectual dark web.
This was a group of people sort of when I was kind of getting popular way back when, when I was one of the first sort of outside of mainstream people building a studio in my garage, sitting down with people across the political divide, whether they were Sam Harris on the left, Uh, or Ben Shapiro on the right just talking it out, having debates about God and having debates about the role of government, all of these things.
The thing kind of blew up.
This was obviously related to Joe Rogan as well and a whole bunch of people.
But it was it was the point of it was we were going to defend free speech and we were going to try to get over some of the right verse left insanity.
I sense it's reforming.
It's retaking shape.
It's not for me to coin the new term, let's say, the new intellectual dark web.
We could probably... Eric Weinstein actually came up with that and it was a little bit sort of tongue in cheek.
It's not for me to coin.
It's probably for one of you guys to coin what this new thing is.
But this thing where Russell Brand is talking to DeSantis and Tucker Carlson is talking to Ice Cube and Bill Maher is talking to Jordan Peterson, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, I wanted to be an example for my kids, you know, really make sure they didn't take it either.
Show them that I, you know, I wanted to stand on my convictions and that I was willing, you know, to lose nine million dollars and more because we've probably lost more, you know, since then.
Okay, so un-vaxxed Ice Cube in a car driving through South Central LA with un-vaxxed Tucker Carlson.
Now, Tucker Carlson, we didn't know he was un-vaxxed until a week and a half ago or so when he did that Blaze Forum and Asa Hutchinson tried to turn the question on him and then he announced he was un-vaxxed.
This isn't specifically about the vax, although it's interesting now to find out that there were a whole bunch of people who privately weren't getting vaxed.
Some people did it a little bit more publicly, whatever it might be.
But the bigger idea that people weren't just swallowing the narrative, that people were saying, oh, the machine wants us to do this and it wants to put mandates down.
And it used two weeks ago was saying my body, my choice.
Now it wants to force you to do things, and it wants you just because you work for somebody
that that person should be able to force you to be injected, all that stuff.
And a lot of people got red-pilled because of it.
Now, I have no doubt that Tucker Carlson and Ice Cube probably have wide, wide disagreements,
perhaps on abortion and borders and all sorts of political stuff.
But this goes to the new thing that is taking shape right in front of us.
And I think that all of us that care about freedom and free speech and decency and living in a country with people that are different from us and all of that stuff, we can help shape it right now.
Again, there's just no doubt these guys have major political differences.
I've got some political differences with Tucker and I have, again, no doubt that I have political disagreements, whatever it might be with Ice Cube.
It doesn't matter.
There's a bigger thing happening right now.
And you know, the way, the best example that I can give you, which is what they gave you right there, when you talk about the machines, well, what is the machine?
It's this amorphous thing.
The machine is Saturday Night Live, that clip they showed you where that hack comedian is doing an impression of Ice Cube and making it look like Ice Cube because he was skeptical of a vaccine that, in the earlier clip, they talked about how it was rushed through in six months, which, by the way, I think that's partly why Trump didn't show up to that blaze media thing with Tucker, because Tucker would hit him on that, right?
Trump is still very, very proud of Operation Warp Speed.
But the point is, what is the machine?
The machine is the corporate press and the corporate comedy that when someone dare takes a step against it, They mock the hell out of you and they try to turn you into the bad guy.
But now there is this bizarro new alliance.
So I'm going to show you something from Fox News that's going to be a bit odd because Fox News is platforming a Democratic candidate unlike MSNBC and unlike CNN who refuse, in Jake Tapper's own words, he refuses to have RFK Jr.
Wouldn't that be something if we had a president who told the truth?
Think about our current president, who I suppose you could say is the leader of the machine, or at least the figurehead of the machine, right?
He's not really leading this thing.
He's a cog in the machine.
He thinks he's in charge of the machine.
But Joe Biden can't say anything true.
Joe Biden doesn't know what he's talking about.
Joe Biden reads poorly off a teleprompter or off the notes that they put in front of him.
We have spokespeople like Crenshawn Pierre who lie for a living.
They are literally paid to lie.
We have people on MSNBC and on The View, as I referenced the other day, you know, Whoopi,
they literally just put a card in front of her and she just reads it.
She doesn't know what she's saying or why she's saying it.
And it's not even about Joy Reid or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.
They're lying, of course they're lying about virtually everything.
But the question, they're just actors.
They're cogs in the machine.
The machine works all the way up to much bigger pieces.
So it's the producers, it's the executives above them, it's the people above them.
That's what we're all trying to figure out and fight.
And it's not left versus right anymore.
It's anyone who is roughly sane Versus the obvious liars and, dare I say, scumbags.
So here is a bit that might shock you because most of you watching this are, let's say, right-leaning or disaffected liberals, probably more on the conservative side of things, especially when it comes to economics.
But here's RFK really making a populist, capitalist argument on economics, the guy running as a Democrat, on Fox News for a conservative crowd.
Hannity has to kind of I don't think Hannity was doing anything on tour there, but you know, he's a Trump guy, so he has to like kind of like run cover a little bit for Trump.
But in essence, what RFK is saying there is that Trump and Biden, they're part of the machine.
They're the ones who locked us down.
as Tucker and Ice Cube talked about, six months to rush out of acts.
That was Trump.
Biden was much bigger on lockdowns and mandates and all of those things.
Trump giving Fauci an award on his way out, right?
So what does this all lead us to?
Like, what does it get us to if there's a whole bunch of people
that are just making some sense right now that are not radicals?
We're all going to be painted as radicals and racists.
Phoenix mentioned to me right before we started the show that apparently Sam Harris, who was a big piece of that intellectual dark web thing that I mentioned up top, apparently on his podcast this week, he just announced that he would never have RFK Jr.
In my view it's worse than it's ever been and you know one party will be in power and then they'll start doing it to the other party and it's going to be back and forth.
So what defines this new please-you-name-it group?
that includes you if you're watching this, this new coalition, this thing that's trying to take
shape. It's ending the machine and the agencies and their collusion with big tech and their assault
on the first amendment, their assault actually on the second amendment, their assault
really on all of our foundational documents and our right to live as we see fit.
But this thing, it's not just about, I'm giving you some heavy hitters, Tucker and RFK Jr.
and all of this.
It's actually starting to leak into a much wider, I would say, cultural moment.
On Tim Pool's podcast yesterday, it felt like a Rubin Report old school get-together, Roseanne Barr, Roseanne, by the way, I've mentioned this before.
I've had her on the show a couple of times and we were pretty good friends when I lived in LA for a while.
Roseanne, who was a lefty her entire life, right?
The show of Roseanne was about this blue collar family that was, you know, really just like, they were trying to do things about race on the show.
The first ever lesbian kiss, if you're into that sort of thing, on network television was on Roseanne's show.
Lefty her entire life.
Then she came out As a Trump supporter, machine tries to destroy her, then they bring back, you may remember, what was it, five years or so ago?
They bring back the Roseanne show.
It's the number one sitcom in America.
She makes one off-color joke, and they cancel the number one sitcom in America.
Actually, they canceled her, they continued the show, and then the show, of course, without Roseanne, oddly, Roseanne without Roseanne, that got canceled immediately after.
Anyway, Roseanne went on Tim Pool's podcast yesterday, Oh, it's just so scary and horrible.
And again, I'm going to take that shape, that this isn't just like a little blip on the Internet.
Well, you have to look at how the mainstream media reacts to it.
So something very interesting, believe it or not, something not just idiotic that that's every week on The View, but something interesting happened on The View yesterday.
Corporate machine view.
They went after Ben Shapiro.
Yes, who is part of this.
Now, you may say Ben is a little more partisan, right?
And that probably is right.
But Ben, I think, is a relatively fair arbiter of what's going on in the world.
And the point is that he and the Daily Wire, especially now that Jordan Peterson are there and everybody else and Knowles and they're all taken off, they are now a threat to the machine.
So what does the machine do?
It goes after you.
So here is Whoopi.
Once again, who has no idea what she's talking about, going off on Ben Shapiro because he's critical of the Barbie movie.
I find it upsetting when material that is based on children's IP and marketed to little girls actually ends up being angry feminist claptrap that alienates men from women, undermines basic human values, and promotes falsehood all at the same time.
Everybody on CNN, including several people who have been fired, like Don Lemon and Brian Stelter, remember that whole week where they kept saying Joe Rogan is a racist because he said the N-word several times and shouldn't Spotify do something about Joe Rogan?
And I kept saying it has nothing Nothing to do with them thinking he's a racist.
Nobody in their right mind thinks Joe Rogan's a racist.
What CNN did not want, because it's part of the machine, is that an independent guy sitting in Austin, Texas, who's doing ayahuasca, hanging out with all this eclectic group of people, was making more sense and getting more viewers than them.
So they were trying to take out the competition.
I also want to say one other thing.
Man, I'm fired up today.
Let me say one other thing on this, and then I have a whole bunch of other things to say, so it's not really one other thing.
If I just say one more thing and then we're ending the show.
When she says, well, I said the thing about it's just a movie, but she says, it's just a doll.
It's just a doll.
And why are we getting worked up over this?
Lady, you guys were just screaming and ranting and raving over just a song yesterday.
Jason Aldean, right?
He's a racist.
Everyone involved is a racist.
Anyway, here is total corporate machine sellout.
Pretend pet conservative Alyssa Farrah with some Claptrap.
And again, I say that not because I'm making some big brouhaha over Barbie and whatever
the message was or wasn't in Barbie.
I'm making the brouhaha over how now you can see the machine operating on people who are
thinking a little bit differently about things, who are thinking a little bit more clearly
and more critically about things.
So now I want to go old school on you.
And some of you who have watched this show for a while might remember this clip.
This is several houses ago when I lived in that crazy place of what?
Oh, no, you let's do something else first.
Okay, we're changing something on the fly.
First, before I get to that, I want to show you, because when Alyssa's talking about the right-wing influencers online, and remember she's corporate press, right?
Now I want to show you something from what?
This has got to be from what, 20 years ago at least?
about 20 years ago, here's Elon Musk 20 years ago predicting how corporate media, the mainstream media,
whatever you wanna call it, that the internet is gonna so fundamentally change that
and how we get information.
And that's the tension that I'm talking about throughout today's episode.
unidentified
I think the internet is the superset of all media.
It is the, it is the be-all and end-all of media.
One will see print, broadcast, arguably radio, essentially all media folding into the Internet.
And what the Internet amounts to is, it's the first It's a two-way communication medium that is intelligent.
It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it, and whether that be radio, whether that be print, whether that be television, broadcast.
I think it's going to revolutionize all traditional media.
First I have to say on like a little bit of like a personal, watching that video from 1996, right, so 25 plus years ago, like the energy of him, the thoughtfulness of him, the way he speaks, it's so like the way that I've spent time with him privately and what you see of him publicly, that he was always thinking about all of these things to open up communication and all of this.
It's why he bought Twitter.
All of that.
But you can see he was pointing out back then that he was basically saying, oh, there's this star in the distance.
And this star in the distance is the promise of the Internet where all of the things that we consume will start being opened up.
We will have new ways of communicating, new ways of getting information, all of this.
And it will be good.
And the promise of it, the hope of it, I guess the synth wave version of it was that it was going to be free and awesome and cool.
And unfortunately, we found while a lot of that happened, Right?
We got all these new voices and all of that.
My career, literally me sitting here right now, your ability to watch this on your phone or whatever you're doing.
We got a lot of that, but it also came with a crazy amount of censorship and it came with a crazy amount of algorithmic manipulation to divide us.
I have many times since had a mea culpa on this one that I should have even offered him more of a defense than I did, although I did offer him a bit of a defense.
And again, whether you agree with him on everything or not, whether you think he's got some conspiracy theories or is mixed up on this or that or the other thing, or you have political disagreements with him like I do, he clearly is not outside of the Overton window.
If you connect that to then what I was talking about a moment ago, Spotify being pressured to get rid of Rogan a year ago, it had nothing to do with anyone thinking that Joe Rogan was racist or anything else.
All of the people who were deplatformed because of vaccines, the Canadian truckers who had their bank accounts closed, All of this stuff, I think again, you can see the picture and why I think this new thing is forming.
So now let's jump over to that Joe Rogan guy, because here he is talking about how the government is going to go out of its way to regulate everything.
There will be new open source sites, there will be sites built to protect free speech, but the government, the machine Is going to do everything it can to clamp down and we don't know, as Eric pointed out, we don't know exactly what that will look like, but I think we're starting to get some hints.
If the open source movement does take hold, if people recognize this as being a real serious threat and start applying, you know, just using whatever it is, whether it's minds or the various open source social media networks, don't you think the government would somehow or another try to regulate that as well if they've already got control over Facebook and Twitter?
So the threat always is that they're going to come in and do that, and that is what they're threatening to do.
There is energy in Washington by people trying to figure out how to regulate or ban open source.
Having said that, banning open source, like interfering at that level, carries consequences with it.
And there are proposals, there are serious proposals from serious people to do what I'm about to describe.
Do you run a software program on everybody's own computer, right, watching everything that they do?
Because you have to make sure that they're not running software they're not supposed to be running.
So, you know, do you have basically an agent built into everybody's chip so that it's not running, you know, software that's not supposed to be running, right?
And then what do you do when somebody's running unapproved software?
You know, do you send somebody to their house to take their computer away?
But the point is, Even as we decentralize things, will the machine try to figure out how to take us out?
Why is the machine so against Bitcoin?
The idea that I could store a decentralized something of value and exchange value with you in a decentralized way that has nothing to do with the government.
Why is that a threat to the government?
Well, then they don't get their peace, right?
Because they're basically like the mafia at this point.
So now I want to show you again, how does the machine react When good people don't do crazy things, just try to think things through properly, just try to question the narrative, etc.
Well, on the televised mental institution known as MSNBC, they had a lawyer, a national security analyst, and a former government official, a former D.C.
federal prosecutor by the name of Mary McCord.
And she doesn't seem to understand what the First Amendment is.
Well, right, this is the challenge because domestically speech is protected by the First
Amendment and that has been interpreted very, very broadly to protect almost everything
that can, that, you know, including things that can sound pretty threatening unless they
cross over the line into sort of what's called a true threat.
And that means, uh...
Uh, the First Amendment does not protect violence or incitement to imminent violence, but the line about where that is and when a threat becomes that type of incitement to imminent violence or violence itself is something that the courts have struggled with over time.
And I think that that's been essentially weaponized by extremists to really push that envelope and try to stay where they feel is just on the protected side of the line.
Well, I think there's a core point here, which is a lot of Americans are up for grabs.
I wouldn't dismiss it as just something that only people on the right are watching Fox News can latch on to.
I mean, we're in a battle for hearts and minds.
And there are people who are on the fence.
You've got to have leaders and messages and messengers and programs that get to those people, that bring them over into community organizing and into nonprofit organizations and away from the Patriot Front and the Oath Keepers.
And I think the parallels with 9-11 are important.
We've talked about this before.
After 9-11, the laws didn't work.
They made massive changes to respond to a new threat.
I think we have to face the fact that many of our structures, laws, and policies may not work.
After 9-11, we created the Department of Homeland Security.
There was massive change in our entire society to face the number one threat, or at least what was communicated as a number one threat.
I think we need the same kind of tectonic shift.
It's got to be much more than see something, say something.
But maybe our laws need to change to respond to the fact that someone like Mike Flynn, the former National Security Director, is openly calling for violence consistently.
That is one of the most mind-blowingly self-conflicting statements I've ever heard.
He's saying, oh, the Patriot Act, all of these new laws, they didn't work, which is why we need a whole new rehash of all of these things.
We just need the machine to give us new laws now.
All of those laws that the very machine gave us about a perceived threat, much like we have a perceived threat right now, that shit didn't work, so can we get a whole bunch new?
So guys, who is holding us back and who is becoming more like the machine every single day?
Well, I have said for quite some time that unfortunately, it is with great dismay, actually, that I say this, but Donald Trump at this point is part of the machine.
One of the key facets of the machine is endlessly lying no matter what, right?
Because the machine wants you to never know what is true so it can manipulate you in any way.
And you know, five or seven years ago when a lot of people were into the Trump thing and he was loose with the truth, he was being loose with the truth and being sarcastic and everything because he was defeating the, he was going after the swamp and the machine and everything else.
Now he's using the exact same tactics as him.
I wanna show you this.
I know it's gonna piss some of my viewers off and that's just fine because I have to tell you the truth.
So check this out, this tweet.
This is a, well, this is a press release that Team Trump put out yesterday.
So this is from the Trump Make America Great Again 2024 official campaign.
Unholy alliance.
DeSantis campaign colluding with Biden's weaponized DOJ to stop President Trump and the MAGA movement.
He is, and then there's this ridiculous statement in there, he is pretending that, you really need to think about this.
Come back to me for a second before we read the tweet.
You really need to think about this, and then I'm going to read a tweet analyzing it.
The idea that Ron DeSantis, who has done more to fight the woke, get ESG out of our schools, you know all the stuff, that he is now working with the Biden administration to take out Donald Trump.
It is completely made up nonsense, but it is nonsense that Trump is throwing on his people.
And as I discussed with Charlie Kirk the other day, Charlie said to me, well, they don't really care about the truth.
They care if something is attitudinally right.
So now I want to read a girl by the name of Tracy Beans online.
She retweeted the Trump thing and I thought she had a good analysis on this.
She said, this is an email sent by the Trump team today.
Reading it, you'd think DeSantis is leading the charge to force more indictments on Trump and he's a crazy leftist hellbent on joining the team attacking him.
But if you click the link in the email to read the piece they used to craft this, you'll see that the only thing that even references any legal woes for Trump is in the very last paragraph and is a quote from a donor saying that the more legal woes may affect the trajectory of the race, which is the fourth screenshot she has there.
It's this type of misleading nonsense that made me start looking at everything differently.
Is there just no way DeSantis could ever win?
If there is just no way DeSantis could ever win, why do you have to lie about him to your supporters?
So you get it, guys.
There is literally no evidence, none, zero, that Ron DeSantis is coordinating with the Biden Department of Justice.
Ron DeSantis, the guy who's getting rid of Soros-backed DAs in cities like Tampa.
Trump is trying to destroy him in the name of his quest for power.
But in this new world that I'm trying to lay out, that lying is just as bad as the other line.
That's what I'm trying to show you.
So I retweeted it.
I wrote this and I think I think it captures it.
Trump can lie about anything and none of his supporters or surrogates will say a word.
As Charlie Kirk said to me yesterday, it's tonal and attitudinal.
They just don't care if he lies about everything.
It's a game and he's using the pawns.
OK, so now let's just jump to a little bit of my interview with with Charlie.
Now, again, I am friends with Charlie.
I am not placing this out there to capitals.
Capital letters destroy Charlie or own Charlie or anything else.
But I'm trying to show you that this I this This constant lying from the machine, which we now all see in the corporate press and anything else, Trump is just mirroring it on the other side.
And we better find a middle way or we are going down one way or another.
So here's me and Charlie.
Your question is really, do you want to take some of the anger that the base has because of the way Trump being treated and he's being treated horribly?
There's probably some way to do that, but I would also say to some extent, If you just want to view this in the political lens, maybe this is why Trump should stop lying about DeSantis every which way, and you know he is.
But if you only care about tonal and attitudinal, think about the lies, lies, but get more lies.
And you think that maybe that is what has gotten us into this nonsense.
So every time someone says the truth, they try to destroy him.
And that's why it's so dangerous what Trump is doing with DeSantis right now.
Forget it, forget if you think DeSantis should be president or he should stay governor,
or even if you like DeSantis or anything else.
This isn't exactly about DeSantis.
Everyone that now believes these crazy theories that Ron DeSantis is now working
with the Department of Justice to take out Donald Trump has been lied to by Donald Trump,
and they seem to want more.
And we better think about what that means before we, on let's say this side of the political aisle, become as completely batshit bananas as everybody on the other side.
You just have to think about that.
Because I guarantee you, I mean I saw it yesterday, On Twitter, nobody, nobody on the right was like, boy, that was a good point.
You know, that we should maybe stop lying about all of this stuff because it's dangerous when we find a guy that's pretty good.
Maybe we like somebody else.
We like Trump.
But we find this guy that we all love.
Everybody on the right universally loved Ron DeSantis.
And now Donald Trump has people thinking he is a turncoat and working with the Biden Department of Justice.
This is a good show for me to, you know, tomorrow's my last show before we go off the grid and we're going to do kind of a recap of the last six months and everything else.
But I think this is the theme that I want to take with me as I go off the grid and I get to think through some of this stuff and also remove some of this stuff from my brain and come at it with fresh eyes when I come back.
But the question is, what side of all of this do you want to be on?
Do you want to be on the side of the machine, of the deep state, of the corporate press, of the liars, of the people who would gladly inject you and fire you and close your bank accounts and call you a racist and all of that stuff?
Do you want that?
The people who will turn you against people you loved six months ago.
For all my Trump viewers, my Trump supporters who now hate DeSantis.
Is that the side you want to be on?
Or do you think it might be a little bit better to be on the side of Tucker Carlson, of Elon Musk, of Russell Brand, of Jordan Peterson, of Bill Maher, of Joe Rogan, of Brett Weinstein, Of Glenn Greenwald, of Jay Bhattacharya, of Ron DeSantis, of the All In podcast guys, David Sachs, of RFK Jr., of Vivek, of Ben Shapiro, of Ice Cube, of Eric Weinstein, blah blah blah blah blah.
Do you think that that might be the way out of this thing?
And that you can actually, you, can actually affect its ability to get us out of the abyss?
And I leave you with, well we got one more clip, two of those guys who sat down earlier in the week, we played some of the clips, Bill Maher and Jordan Peterson.
They disagree on everything.
Literally the nature of the universe.
You have a 67-year-old bachelor, lifelong, multi-millionaire atheist Versus sitting down with the guy who has, I think, done more for belief and family and why you should have children and all of those things.
And here they are with nothing other than mutual respect and a joy in sitting with each other and bridging that divide.
I don't think it's the new IDW, the new intellectual dark web, but like, what is this thing?
The one thought that I have on this, and maybe you could take it from there, is that if we're fighting the machine, what fights the machine?
Like, we're all, we're all cogs that are trying to, we don't want to be cogs, we want to be something that breaks the machine, but what the hell is it?