Michael Malice hosts Dave Rubin's return, dissecting a chaotic week featuring Trump's federal indictment, Anheuser-Busch's brand sales over trans messaging, and Obama's suppressed letters. They analyze the Republican primary landscape, predicting Chris Christie's threat to DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy's media warfare, while contrasting Maui wildfire tragedies with White House security lapses. Ultimately, the episode highlights a fractured political climate where personal scandals and legal battles redefine the upcoming election narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
Wait, this guy, Doug, who's running for president, who made it in over Larry Elder, had a basketball accident yesterday and is now not showing up here today?
It's interesting that Chris Christie, who has been very, very vocally anti-Trump, I'm sure that happened even before you left, he signed that loyalty pledge.
I don't think this loyalty pledge is going to hold any water.
So I'm like August 1st or 2nd, I didn't have a phone anymore and I didn't have any social media or anything but I turned on Apple TV just to turn on Netflix or whatever and Pee Wee's Big Adventure was the number one thing on there and then like A few days later, I went into, I think, HBO Max, and they had Big Top Pee-Wee and another Pee-Wee thing, and I was like, either he got caught in the theater again doing his thing, or he's dead.
So for some weird reason, I keep getting tagged in posts of people freaking out, being like, Oh, Crip, did you hear about this Leah Thomas person winning awards and shit and swimming?
It's fucked up, man.
What do you think?
I'm just like, I mean...
All right, Marty McFly's mom wants to fucking swim.
Uh, he had a lifelong disability, so, you know, he was young and, you know, so it's very unfortunate, but I just wanted to give him a shout out because he was a great kid who was a very, very funny, dark humor, which I very much enjoy.
Well, her dancers have sued her, citing sexual harassment, including taking them to like red light districts and having them doing inappropriate things.
But they also sued her for fat shaming them.
And I'm going to quote my buddy comedian Kurt Metzger, who said, if Lizzo's fat shaming you, maybe there's a problem.
You know, when I went off the grid last year was the Mar-a-Lago raid, and then when I came back, actually, and Larry Elder was the guest host, the Mar-a-Lago raid, I think, was like the first week of August, right?
And then I came back, he tells me about the whole thing, and I was like, you know nothing's gonna happen with this.
Because a lot of, you know, as you and I both discussed often, America has become much more divided and people are talking past each other, people are talking in their own bubbles.
Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom agreed to debate because there really is this idea in America of like, do you want the California model or do you want the Florida model?
Putting aside DeSantis for a second, the fact that the DNC or somebody is letting Newsom do this, to me, that's more a signal of we're showing Biden the door.
Because if something, God forbid, happens to the president, Kamala Harris is not going to be a strong candidate, so it'll be very easy for him to swoop in and take that from her.
Because, you know, when I was away, so basically all I was doing, I'm in the rainforest and, you know, we were eating right and working out and drinking some tequila and whatever.
And I was just every day, I never watched TV or anything, even when I was doing cardio, I was just staring out into the forest.
So the other thing I think that's interesting, which I don't think is discussed enough, is a lot of times when you talk about Hunter Biden, it almost seems like you're just being salacious, but he's shacked up with his dead brother's wife.
And the question I always had, and it sounds like a joke, but I'm not joking.
Although my sister and I have a very sick sense of humor, and she sent me photos of my nephew and she goes, he looks like you, it's time for a DNA test.
Also, I do want to, I assume at some point we will dive back into a little bit of what's going on like with the numbers with all these guys that are here tonight.
Like, when they just randomly pick, we're going to cancel Roseanne Barr because she made one off-color joke after spending 40 years, you know, fighting all the right fights and being a hero of blue-collar and minorities and blah, blah, blah.
When a bunch of people are just like, we've had it with you forcing your trans nonsense down our throat.
We're not going to drink this beer anymore, Bud Light.
And I guess it's now happening to some other brands.
It's like, that's a beautiful thing.
That's what, you know, like that's your choice as an American.
You walk into the beer aisle and you got 500 choices easily at any major supermarket.
And you can just be like, I'm just not drinking.
And it's not like Bud Light is like, I'm not a beer guy, but like, it's not great.
So, someone did some research in Obama's history, you know, his writing, his autobiographies, which are very much mythological and trying to create a narrative about who he was, and they found letters that had been suppressed where he was writing to his ex-girlfriend at the time about how he fantasizes daily about having sex with men.
This is the point I made on Twitter, and I think it's actually funny, but I think it's true.
For a long time, there was this mystique about political figures, and Bill Clinton was never asked about the pretty grounded rape accusations from Winnie the Broderick.
I think it was either, I think it was in 2020 that a reporter actually asked him to his face.
And this was kind of under the radar.
But to me, it was a huge moment that now, instead of protecting, oh, we can't ask him about this.
No, we're going to ask him.
At some point, I predict, and this isn't a big prediction, someone is going to ask former President Barack Obama, did you stop having gay fantasies after you got married to Michelle Obama?
And when that happens, it's going to be the funniest thing on earth.
So basically you're saying, and I think I've roughly been making this argument for a long time, the protection racket that the media used to have for the politicians is coming to an end.
No, who really broke it was Stuttering John when he asked Jennifer Flowers if she was going to sleep with any other presidential candidates and if Bill Clinton used a condom.
Well, what about all the people going to jail for marijuana when Hunter's talking to the New Yorker, or the New York Magazine, or whatever it was, about smoking crack and leaving his crack pipe in the Hertz?
But you're prying that Senate seat from her cold, dead hands.
I don't know if you remember this, and this also sounds like a joke, but it's not.
There was reporting, I believe it was the New York Post, that Chuck Schumer, had sat down with her and being like, Diane, you know, you've got to resign.
You're not all there, you know, whatever.
And she agreed and then forgot.
And he had to have this conversation with her, I believe three times.
You can, people can look this up.
So at the other, at the other extreme is like, look, Republicans vote for Strom Thurmond until he was 99.
He's a reliable Republican vote.
She's going to vote Democrat.
What would be the difference if you had some random other Democrat in that seat?
And some people are thinking, wait a minute, step down so we can put Kamala back in the Senate, and that'll free up the VP slot for someone who will add to the ticket.
Again, it's just like these are the most corrupt people.
When you step away from it and then you start thinking about it, the cocaine at the White House, the $80,000 a month Burisma deal for the crackhead who had no experience in Ukrainian energy.
It's like something ain't right here.
But again, so they take him down, which then maybe takes down Biden and you get Kamala or you get Gavin.
No, no, if somehow they could really figure out that, because Biden admitted it, the Ukrainian energy thing and firing the prosecutor, Biden admitted it all on camera.
My point is that if there's just enough stink around everything with Hunter and then people are just done with Joe and the faculties and everything, it's like they could get rid of him or push him aside.
I think it'd be very, I don't think, I think The tribes protect their own, so they're gonna very easily claim that Hunter's like, look they're targeting his family, leave the guy alone, his kids died already, and I think it'd be very hard to push him off for this reason.
I'm going to have to break it down because this is a long, complicated story that I wanted to add, but this is something that's going on in Europe.
I'm going to need a minute on this.
Germany, people in America are like, oh, the two parties suck, we need a third party, you know, blah blah.
Many European countries have like five, six, seven, eight parties.
Germany has six parties, okay?
You got the two main parties, the Social Democrats, the main center-left party, the CDU, which is the main center-right party, Angela Merkel's party.
Then you have two right-wing and two left-wing subsidiary parties.
You have the left, you have Die Linke, which was the former communists, and the Greens.
And with the right side, you had the Free Democrats, which are basically kind of pro-business party, and this recent Alternative for Deutschland, which are kind of the far-right nationalists.
There's a couple of wings in this party and some of them are not so nice.
Dave, you are Jewish, you are gay, maybe they would have sterilized you, I don't know.
Point being, they have been spiking in the polls after picking up two actual minor wins.
They're now in second place at 21%.
There's talk now in Germany of, everyone's racking their brains, what do we do?
Of trying to ban the party, which to me is completely insane.
First of all, who's banned political parties in Germany's past?
Number one.
But what are those 20% of voters going to do?
They're not going to vanish.
And in fact, there was an election, a regional election where there was some dispute over the list.
So they weren't on the ballot.
So another party called Citizens for Rage took their place and they got 10%, which would have been the 10% that AFD got.
My concern is if you ban this party, first of all, they're going to say with a straight face, we're the only party that the establishment hates, which is a great vote for them.
What's their move?
Then they go into the main center right party.
They're in a position to take it over because they got 20% of the vote who are radicalized.
Well, almost everything that happens, well, you've written a lot about this, but almost everything that happens on the right, when the weird stuff arises on the right, you don't have to look that far to figure out how insane the left went to cause it, right?
So if you were a German right now, and you were like, well, what's happened in Germany in the last 15 years, and I'm obviously not an expert in Germany, but with the amount of mass migration that came when they literally let in
over a million people, I think around two million people from all these African countries in the Middle East,
they gave them all these services, they gave them homes, they were spending something like four billion dollars
on dental work for these people, you take from the native Germans, and then people get
So my position is they've been at it for Rudy for a long time because he proved that you don't have to have high crime rates and poverty in these cities.
New York was considered ungovernable.
He showed that when you have these out of control cities, you guys want this.
This is by design and they've never forgiven him for it.
Not now Michael, but I really you know, the last thing I did before I went off the grid We did our goodbye show and then at the last moment he was coming to Miami So I did a show with him at locals and then I was gone for the grid It was so the last the last person in this world that I talked to really before leaving was Rudy and I just I even if he's No, I don't think so.
David Schaffer, who was former chairman of the GOP, Georgia State Senator Sean Still, and three other names, and of course, President Trump is the 19th person.
And he's looking at, I think it's something like 700 years with all these charges.
I mean, doesn't it seem to you that they're just going to keep, I don't know if there's anything else still in the docket because it seemed like Georgia was the big one, but okay, so a DC one I missed on August 1st.
Now you're telling me the George one, which we knew was coming.
But haven't they already said that the first, the trial for the federal case, isn't it in, it's next April or something, right?
So it's like right before Super Tuesday.
It's like they want all of this shit to make everyone crazy.
So he's made the point publicly that he believes that he will get some convictions, that they will be overturned, but those overturns will happen after the election, so they're going to get what they want ahead of time.
And if they see a mugshot, for a lot of people that's enough to be like, I'm either not going to vote for him or I'm just going to vote for the opponent.
You know, I'll tell you the number one thing that people said to me when they saw me in the rainforest at the resort or when I've seen people at the airport or at the supermarket for the last month, everyone says the same thing to me.
A lot of people are saying, oh, it's crazy, it's crazy.
But I would always calm them down so that they didn't ruin it.
But the other thing that they always say is like, I'm so sick of it.
I'm so sick of it.
And I think that's partly what the machine wants.
It wants you to be so sick of it that you just freaking wave the white flag and you're just like, all right, we'll take the worst of the worst because.
Have you seen the, there's a compilation video that we played a few days before I went off the grid where it's all these people on The View and MSNBC and CNN, everybody saying basically, oh, we want Trump to be the nominee.
Joy Behar, we want Trump to be the nominee.
Joy Reid, we want people to be.
Everyone named Joy is a complete lunatic, by the way.
But the thing about the Trump and it's like do they want it to happen so that he's in jail or do you want him to be the nominee thing is my argument for DeSantis beyond all of the the reasons that I think he is good he actually can bring in new people there's no people that Trump can bring who's the new person that's like suddenly like I'm voting for Trump now so if you think the election... What about the staff?
I have a long career, I've made a name for myself, I've got a wife, I've got kids, I've got a family, so on and so forth.
Husband, kids, family.
Why would I work for this guy when I'm going to be charged as his lawyer with RICO charges, possibly disbarred, my name is going to be ruined in perpetuity, and then if I quit or I'm fired, he's going to go on Trost Central and call me an idiot.
This is something that MAGA has to grapple with.
Why would the people who he would want to have as administration put themselves through that?
Janet Yellen, who... The one thing I like about Janet Yellen, I'm from Brooklyn all my life, people don't have that accent anymore.
Like, it's a guy accent, so when she talks, I'm like, we must preserve this as much as we can.
It's even as much as I hate Bernie, it's a little... I can deal with a little... She admitted that when she was in China, she had psychedelic mushrooms.
We remember in 2016 during the debates, the 2016 season, that was like the first question, I think it was Meghan Kerry, who asked, yeah, is there anyone here who will not agree to support the nominee?
And Trump was the only one who raised his hand.
He told, I mean, the others were lying because they didn't support him.
And he goes, I don't, I can't, I don't know what some of these guys stand for.
I can't say I'm going to admit to support them.
Yeah.
Trump is now very fairly saying it's like, look, if Chris Christie's the nominee, this guy can't get my name out of his mouth.
Well, of course, the argument against that, though, is that in essence, then you're you're basically voting for a Democrat.
You're supporting a Democrat.
So, right.
If you don't push the base to vote, even if it was Chris Christie, who's a big nothing and obviously will be out after tonight, but like.
You then, in essence, are saying, okay, let's have a Democrat president.
That's the argument against the base version of that.
When I say it's a ploy, what I mean really, though, is that it's a ploy in that if he did not want to debate, because he does not want to be up there tonight, because he's number one, and what he really wants, and I don't know what the numbers are.
Maybe you can tell me what the latest numbers are.
Like, if what he really wants is everyone to attack DeSantis, which is what's going to happen tonight, and he'll unleash Vivek on DeSantis, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If that's what he really wants then that seems like a good play like you just sit out of it and I'm bigger than everybody like there's you know, it's it's machinations and the guy's a TV star, you know, the only Reality show I ever watched in my entire life literally literally was celebrity apprentice So this is the type of thing that he does right funny story the I'm not this is also not a joke the first part of this is not a joke the Women in Real Housewives, that very successful, very popular franchise, they're, Bethany Franklin, who's the lady like, and a bunch of them, they're thinking of unionizing.
And I suggested that- That's the funniest fucking thing I've ever heard in my- The name of that union should be called the Special Olympics.
But what I think is going to be interesting tonight, I'm going to strongly disagree with you when you say that Chris Christie is going to be over tonight.
Chris Christie, I love using all the puns with him, really punched above his weight in 2016.
Because I think you might remember, he was the one who broke Marco Rubio.
unidentified
Because Marco Rubio was saying, Barack Obama, don't act like Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing.
He put him away because Jared Kushner's dad tricked his own brother, secretly videotaped him with a prostitute.
Look this up.
It's just complete crazy stuff.
So there's a lot of animosity between the Kushner family and Chris Christie, although one of the Kushners donated to Christie's campaign, Murray Murray, I forget his name, just recently, a minor Kushner figure.
Point being, Chris Christie has been making the point, Trump's a loser.
We lost the midterms.
We lost 2020.
This guy's a guaranteed loser.
Felony.
And as a former prosecutor, he knows RICO is no joke.
This is something that's very ambiguous law.
So I think he's the one people shouldn't sleep on tonight.
My sleeper all along has been Nikki because I think the more that the craziness gets ramped up, I know you definitely disagree with her on foreign policy for sure, and I have some disagreements which I discussed with her on the show not too long ago.
But I think she will consistently be seen as sort of like the sane middle person in all the fighting.
But the thing with Christy is, you might be right that he might have a nice moment up there tonight, like he could just maybe hit DeSantis out of nowhere or something like that.
But it depends what the... I don't know what all the qualifications are for the subsequent debates.
You remember in 2016, they had to have the kids' table, remember?
There were literally 17 candidates.
Oh, right.
So it behooves the Republican Party to have the criterion be fairly low, because they don't want to look like the DNC, where it's just like, look, we're just going to gin it for Hillary.
So eight people I don't think is a crazy number to have on that stage.
Eight is a perfectly good number for a first debate.
I have to say, though, the Larry Elder thing just personally is disappointing to me because his message is good, and maybe Tim Scott will share some of that message, but that's kind of disappointing.
But Christy, I just don't know where the people that are going to come out and support him really are, but I think you're right.
For television purposes, or for the hit, the punch, the body slam, so to speak, yeah, he might do something interesting tonight.
So basically he had this point about 9-11 about how like, look, we don't know the whole story, so on and so forth.
Here's the whole thing.
Let's talk about this.
You know how the corporate press works, which is if you say we don't know the whole story about 9-11, it can range anything from missiles hit the Twin Towers to The following, which is undisputably true, there were pages redacted from the 9-11 report.
Maybe justifiably, but the point is the government has kept certain things from the public.
Maybe they had to.
But the point is, it's literally impossible to say we know everything.
So we're, you know, tonight we're doing the post-debate show from right here, and I think we're working on it, but it looks like we'll probably have the governor and Nikki and Vivek and a few of the others that'll come up here.
Vivek right after.
You know, I got into a beef with him.
Okay.
That's right, I remember that.
I asked about that, yeah.
Oh, you did, right.
He was relentlessly going after DeSantis, refusing to go after Trump, and he kept saying that DeSantis signed a hate speech law in Florida, and it was not a hate speech law.
It was a property rights law, and I went through all the little bullet points of it.
It was about property rights.
There's nothing that you can't say in Ohio that you can say in Ohio where he's from.
It's such a criminal thing, and it should be, what do they call it?
So sometimes they call it the estate tax, the wealth tax, or the death tax.
But it really is criminal if you think about it.
It does not matter whether you think poor people should have more money or anything else.
The idea that after you've done everything right your whole life, you pay into the system, you do all of that, you should have every right to leave your money that has been taxed all along the way to whoever you want, that the government will just be like, yes, we're taking 40% of that, by the way, to throw it to give Ukraine more bombs It's even worse than that because this comes out of the 1890s early 1900s progressivism where their whole idea is no one should have advantages early on in life.
So you're saying his reaction to it has been to just basically fight the media, sort of do the Trump version of that. He said it on CNN last night. He's like,
look, you guys misquote people, take things out of context all the time. This is how you
guys operate. You know, this started, I think one of the earliest moments of this was in 2012
when I forget the guy's name, but the huge job from CNN had new camera John, John King,
John King was a junkie.
He had Newt Gingrich on in the presidential debate.
And the first question he asked Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, is, is it true that when you had your first divorce, you had asked your wife at one point for an open marriage?
And Newt Gingrich goes, we're deciding the next president.
And first of all, it's false.
But for you to ask this is very close to despicable.
I think it was 2016, it was Ted Cruz who was just like, you're asking me, us to fight against each other, online gambling?
These aren't the questions.
What is wrong with you people?
And after that, the Republicans said they would never do another debate with what I think was CNBC or MSNBC who was hosting, I think it was CNBC.
Point being, it's been a very effective and in my personal opinion, correct strategy for the Republicans to be like, these guys have an agenda and it's important to call them out on it instead of just pretending these are objective Look, although I've been obviously somewhat frustrated by Trump for the last couple months, I fully give him credit for that.
It's a minor one, but basically he had a big campaign shakeup, so it was a public acknowledgement that things aren't where they should be.
And I have to say, from my personal perspective, I have been at this a long time, you and I both have, I have never in my lifetime I've never seen as much of a sea change in terms of perception of a candidate from DeSantis, who in October of 2022, I think every Trump voter would say, this is the greatest governor we've ever seen.
And then the day after he announces, well, he's another Jeb Bush.
And actually, one of the things I was thinking off the grid as I was purging a lot of the thoughts, this thing that you're mentioning, that the guy, DeSantis went from, wow, this is the guy who won the state by 20 points, he's the standard bearer of everything we've all wanted out of a Republican, good young family man in the military, lawyer, crushing his opponents, turning Florida, which was basically blue and then purple, now to the most red state in the nation, that this is the best guy we got.
And one thought that I did have constantly over the break, I think, sort of, like, philosophically, is that Trump did do something with a very dark power here.
If you can take the guy that everyone thought was the best, was the successor, you know, all of that stuff, and now you can make the base hate him, purely on lies.
That was the point.
It's purely on lies.
I'm not telling you he's perfect.
I disagree with him on the abortion thing, for example.
But, like, everyone knows, even the people that are being critical of him, know that this is the best candidate right now, like, in a holistic sense.
I really believe that.
But Trump turned a huge amount of people against him.
That's a very dark power to have.
If you do it all based on lies, saying he's working with Soros, saying he's friends with Paul Ryan, who Trump had far more to do with Paul Ryan, all those things.
Don't you view that as like a, do you see what I'm saying?
Like there's a dark energy to that.
If you can just manufacture a hatred of somebody, that's dangerous.
As a Republican, or even a prominent Republican, you are going to have to know that there's not going to be anything that they won't sink.
A good example of this, which happened way before you went on your sabbatical, is his wife had cancer.
I think she's better now, thank God.
He took a day off, no one knew where he was, because she had cancer treatments.
And there are articles being like, oh, your wife has cancer?
Well, you should step down.
And it's just like, Completely shameless, completely despicable, just a really nasty low blow.
The point is, you knew you're going after Trump, right?
If you're going to announce, you knew who you're facing.
Trump is not a mystery or secret at this point.
You know exactly who you're going up against.
So you, as the campaign, you know he's going to hit you high, he's going to hit you low, he's going to go after everything, nothing's going to be held sacred.
It is your responsibility as the campaign to be ready for that and to have a counterpunch
and to be able to not let your opponents define you.
And he's been doing, his campaign has done a very bad job of this.
But what do you think about what I said about just I just mean this philosophically, that that Trump is using something that we all hate the media for.
We all hate the media for its endless lies and that it can turn good people into bad people
and it can literally just 180 the truth all the time.
And you, I quote you every day on my show, the corporate press is the enemy of the people.
That's a dark power.
And Trump is also using just the other version of that dark power, the other side of the coin on that.
And I guess that, I don't know.
Maybe I'm like... I don't know.
Maybe I've been off the grid, so politics is like... But here's the thing.
But the irony or the sadness, I suppose, is that these people all loved DeSantis a few months ago, as you pointed out, and they would all love him as president.
And I think he would be a much better president for what MAGA actually is, and accomplished, and hire the right people, and all of those things.
And again, right now I'm being a better quote-unquote surrogate than maybe his guys are.
But it's like, this is the guy that you were all waiting for.
And that Trump said, no, this has to be me again, or let's fucking blow up the whole thing, is...
I don't know, maybe I'll feel a little bit differently after I'm on the grid for a couple weeks.
I was talking to a prominent conservative on the phone the other day and he made the point, and this actually kind of rang true, the fear, and I don't think this is crazy because we don't know ahead of time because he's not president yet, is that he would do a much He would be much more playing ball with the establishment than it would look like as his role as a governor where you're basically the executive.
But I think you can just look at someone's track record and what has this guy said that he didn't accomplish?
What has he like massively lied about?
He turned?
I mean, you look at in any other election, if Trump didn't exist right now, and we don't have to do hours on Trump right now.
But like, if Trump, if Trump wasn't running right now, all these people would be supporting DeSantis.
And in any, put, remove this presidential election, if there was, just put us on a slightly different planet, and a guy wins by 20 points and like completely flips the political system, and then becomes the place where everyone's moving to, that the economy's flourishing and is safe, everybody would be like, uh, maybe that's the guy.
Again, I'm not, those people, yes, the machine people, yes.
Yes, exactly.
We the people who are somewhat free-thinking and are willing to agree to disagree and that are MAGA in that you've got Rudy Giuliani who's pro-choice along with the evangelicals who are pro-life.
That thing, most of them would be looking at DeSantis like, you know.
One of his big donors said he's not giving him any more money.
I think, surprisingly from my understanding, and please double-check me at home, I think Tim Scott, other than Vivek, in terms of fundraising, has done a superb job.
Maybe he turned money from his Senate campaigns because he had nominal opposition.
Mike Pence, apparently, was on the bubble in terms of fundraising.
I mean, there's talk about this would be very easy for them in terms of the election to kind of have the same system that was so effective for them in 2020.
So the feelers have been coming out in the press that there's going to be another wave and we might have to do all the sort of things again.
I live in the free state of Florida, and I'm never putting on a mask again, and I did not get injected, and I will never be injected, and it's complete... Well, yes.
But in terms of the turnout and the votes, that's the... Yeah, could you... Look, imagine if it was DeSantis, who has now signed all these laws that you'll never be forced to... No, no, Dave, Dave, you're not hearing me.
No, no, I got you.
What I'm saying is you might be right.
They could just manufacture it a month before the election, get everybody afraid, and then it makes Florida look insane, right?
But meaning you'd scare the hell out of everybody and then be like, Oh, and the nominee is the most anti-COVID safe person that you could possibly, possibly imagine.
That would work more against DeSantis than it would even against Trump, because Trump obviously did Warp Speed and everything else.
Yeah, that's horse shit.
And people are falling for it.
Like, they're really bringing it back in Hollywood.
And people called me crazy, but I don't think it's that crazy.
If Trump is forced off the ballot for some reason, And there's a lot of talk that we don't even need his agreement, that if you, like a former confederate, if you had like, I forget what the term was, being an insurrectionist, therefore Congress can just declare that you can't be a candidate for a federal office.
There is some quiet buzz in the Republican Senate and within Mitch McConnell's office as well that maybe it's time for him to step down for his own health.
Yeah, he just recently had a photo of himself holding up a veggie tray, and he wasn't pointing at his head, he was pointing at, like, carrots and broccoli.
So the other thing is that I think those are kind of the big, big stories.
I think we hit them all.
unidentified
I want to make sure that... So the main thing is that Pee-wee Herman did die.
frustration what it's called, which is pro-pedophile rights or destigmatizing
whatever and I tweeted at every single person on the Bloomberg opinion staff
I'm like was this your decision? Do you support it? They of course all ignored me
so at a certain point in my view if the corporate press were 1% as concerned
about child abuse as they were about climate change, things would be a lot better. There was
an article in Canada's Globe and Mail editorial by a priest and the headline was, the far-right's
concern over pedophilia is dangerous. And I'm like, you know, if this is where people are freaking
out about, I think this is something that's right. And I got to tell you, I also don't like it.
And I'm sure you'll agree when conservatives are trying to make it a partisan issue,
not in terms of who's fighting it, but in terms of who's perpetrating it.
Because the people who are committing these acts cross all lines.
You don't check their voter registration.
They go to where the kids are.
This is something that I talk a lot about because a friend of mine came out and when I talked about it on Rogan with his permission, Several of my friends came out to me.
I'm an uncle now, I have two nephews.
This is something I think needs to be discussed more.
It's just very disturbing to me how common apparently it is and we don't have the language to discuss it.
If someone's dad was a drunk, if your mom, you know, was violent, we could talk about it.
Oh, that sucks.
But people feel the need to hold this as a secret and then they're suffering all their lives.
So I'm glad this is being discussed more and I'm disturbed by these attempts to downplay concerns about It's really bizarre, also, because every one of us was a child, and most of us hopefully will have children, or you have nieces and nephews, or whatever it is.
And do you remember when Elon took over Twitter, how suddenly, out of no—oh, I think maybe you might have tweeted about this before anyone.
Yeah, I remember that because all those reporters who were writing headlines, I just searched for their Twitter feed.
I'm like, have you written about this before?
And now you start caring that Elon took over.
It's like, do you really care about the issue?
Or do you care that this is a cudgel for you to hit Elon over the head with?
To leverage this as a gotcha moment to me is so gross.
It's something that is so prevalent.
And again, it's not a political thing.
I know that some conservatives, I think everyone's either Republican or Democrat.
I hear this a lot on social media, like, oh, everyone rioting in 2020 were Democrats.
It's like, these people aren't civic minded citizens.
They're not registered to vote.
Like, yeah, you can send them out group, but come on, they don't really have opinions on the estate tax.
Climate change.
They're just criminals.
So I think it just does a big disservice to kind of try to make it... Dennis Haster, former Speaker of the House, obviously went to jail for things associated with this.
So Kurt Metzger, who I mentioned earlier, had this great joke.
I saw him in Austin, where he made the comment, he goes, Paul, and again, conservatives don't know how to take a win.
Like if things get better, they don't realize it.
They just keep complaining.
Here's a very obvious example.
I'm sure everyone listening to this remembers.
We need more Muslim immigration.
We need more Muslim immigration.
Refugees welcome here.
Because your con was sold into the constitution, Hillary Clinton's democratic convention.
That backfired.
Like people were like, we don't want this.
And they just stopped I'm talking about it.
This is a win for conservatives, but conservatives don't acknowledge their victory.
So, we all remember Paula Deen.
You know, Kurt makes this joke, he goes, wait a minute, this old white lady used the n-word once, 30 years ago, and she's ruined, and it's like, they should build statues to her.
This is the least racist white woman the South ever had.
So all of the, you know, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of newspapers that were syndicating Dilbert kicked him off.
He runs them all on Locals now.
I mean, how cool that in this fight that you and I have been doing and this crazy YouTube thing that we've been doing for years, I created this tech company that eventually merged with this tech company that we're sitting in the booth outside the debate, defending all of the nonsense.
You can't be a free speech absolutist unless you're gonna use circular reasoning because we all agree that like Dave Rubin, I'm gonna kill you is not acceptable.
Child pornography is not acceptable.
Doxing is probably for most people is not acceptable.
So when people say free speech absolutist, my preference would be within the confines of the law of the United States, which has done a pretty damn good job on this because of the First Amendment.
So I actually believe in libel and slander laws.
And I believe that you can't openly threaten somebody and you can't yell fire in a crowded theater with the intent to do harm.
You can yell fire in a crowded theater, it's about intent.
And when you watch, there's no, before social media came around, if you were, if it's 1987 and you were watching the Cosby show or you were watching American Gladiators and a commercial for Tide or a commercial for Mercedes-Benz came on, no one thought that had something to do with endorsing the Cosby show or American Gladiators.
We've done this very weird thing in social media where someone thinks because a pre-roll ad plays before one of my videos it has something to do with me or something like that and that That psychological shift that everyone's endorsing everything as opposed to a company wants to just sell their freaking pans or they just want to sell their products, that I think has been a bit of an issue.
The bigger point is if they want to have a prominent celebrity on their platform, which they do, and that celebrity is going to be the subject of slurs and abuse and all this kind of hateful stuff, it's going to be hard to draw the names that you want.
And that's something we're worried about as a company.
And that's why Rumble, which again, we're at the Rumble studio here, which is awesome.
Rumble is the exclusive live streamer tonight.
It's not on YouTube, the debate.
It's on Rumble.
It's so awesome that we're able to build all this.
You know, Rumble is running its own cloud.
Like we're building the separate internet.
It's really what we're doing.
I mean, you said Scott Adams was one of the first guys.
I think the first three guys I called, I think it was you, Scott Adams and Bridget Phetason were the three that really helped me launch this entire thing so it's pretty cool.
I think Phoenix is saying to get to something on the 2nd, on August 2nd I guess there was something we missed and then we're pretty much close to wrapping.
I think Tim Scott, look, I've had him on the show, I like him, I think he's been a good senator and I think he represents a lot of the right ideas and they're chanting USA maybe for us.
It's funny, we've got the, people can't see it right now, we'll take some pictures, but the DeSantis bus 2024 is right there and then there's some pro-Trump people.
There's some Trump people right here, so it's starting to percolate around here.
But wait, sorry, Tim Scott?
No, I think he'll say some nice things, and I think it'll be sort of like people won't really want to attack him, and I think he'll do just fine tonight.
It doesn't long-term get you there, but I think it's some of the right ideas, and he has a nice way about him, and I think Nikki Haley is going to be the only woman on that stage.
Look, the truth is, as much as the Trump base seems to hate Nikki, Nikki was at the U.N.
under Trump, got us out of all of these accords.
We didn't get into wars when she was our U.N.
ambassador.
I think she's just like a pro and she was an extremely good governor of South Carolina.
So even though I fully disagree with her or let's say 80% disagree with her on Ukraine, which is obviously a big issue, I think she's just going to come off as pretty good.
Maybe a little scripted and a little whatever, but I think she's going to be like people.
Remember those women that you're talking about that maybe could shift a little bit this time or think Biden's ridiculous or the Democrats are nuts or they've had it with the wokes.
It's like, she's the type of person that could be like, all right, I actually could do this.
He's clearly going to be in some ways... You think someone's going to go after him?
It's going to be interesting to see who they go after tonight, because if DeSantis is on the down-climb... Trump's already done the damage there, so why would everyone go after DeSantis?
I think that's what people want more than anything else.
I know we all behave differently online and Twitter and all that stuff, but I really think people are just like, boy, wouldn't it be nice if we could just return to something that was roughly decent?
You know, just like a roughly approximate ballpark.
In a way, this is going to be like a Blondie concert without Debbie Harry, right?
If Trump's not there, and he's obviously the former president, and obviously Biden's win was in some ways a referendum on the Trump on the Trump presidency, like what do you do?
And it's really hard for you as, let's suppose, Senator Tim Scott to be like, when I'm president,
it's like, you've got two huge obstacles, which is the entire Democratic media apparatus,
and you've got the Trump campaign to go through.
So, you know, there's kind of this phoniness about it if you're just gonna pretend that