Dave Rubin hosts Michael Malice, Glenn Greenwald, and Jordan Peterson to dissect the first GOP debate in Milwaukee, where Ron DeSantis appeared scared and Vivek Ramaswamy faced booing for calling rivals "bought and sold." While Chris Christie impressed with his aggression, Tim Scott was dismissed as lacking gravitas, and Donald Trump's absence was debated as either a legal necessity or a democratic norm violation. Peterson also details his upcoming self-funded "forced re-education" on social media amidst Canadian professional complaints, highlighting a broader shift where podcasts now drive political discourse beyond traditional media. [Automatically generated summary]
I think the big winner tonight was the Democratic establishment.
Because if I was the Democratic establishment and watched this kind of clown car, I would feel very confident about my chances going into 2024, even with a Weekend at Bernie situation with the corpse of a candidate.
I thought it was a very bad job by the moderators.
I thought they did a terrible job of holding everyone in place.
People take as much space as you give them, right?
You and I both do this.
I haven't seen debate moderation that week since you had Candace and Blair on your show.
He seemed like he was an also ran at one point when he was going back with the fake, he actually looked scared and startled.
I thought it was a very poor night for him because this was his moment to be like, you guys are talk.
I'm the one who delivers results.
Look at Florida.
We are the model.
He could have turned to Mike Pence and said, there's a reason people have Florida as the model and not Indiana.
When you were governor, no one was saying, let's move to Indiana.
He didn't take any of these opportunities.
And I thought one of the weakest moments he had was when they're asking about January 6th, which is pertinent because tomorrow president Trump is going to be arrested, indicted, excuse me, arrested as a result of this.
And he's like, well, I'm not worried about January 6th.
I'm worried about January 20th, 2025, which is such a canned line.
It's like, this isn't just some historical oddity.
This is currently the news right now with the frontrunner.
So I know he came prepared, but I thought he was very poorly prepared.
He's more, you know, his arms are longer There's a lot of facial reactions and little little things from what I could tell in there the crowd kind of liked it at the beginning But was very tired about it at the end I thought the one line that really hurt him actually was when he said this thing you're everyone on this stage except for me is bought and sold I think that was roughly the quote and everyone in the audience and Everyone booed him, even people that were applauding him before.
Like this idea that yes, you are just the non-candidate candidate.
Everyone else has canned lines.
Your canned line of saying that they have canned lines is not a canned line.
I thought there was something that it struck me as he lost momentum as it kind of went on.
Although he had some night, him and Pence really were like, they ain't going to dinner tonight.
At the same time, like you said, I feel like he came off in some ways like a Wish.com Donald Trump, where it's just like, yeah, we know the schtick that you're doing.
But he's very smart, because as you and I discussed earlier on your show, what happens if Trump is forced out of the race?
Where do those 40% of MAGA voters ride or die with Trump?
Where are they going to go?
Clearly making a bid for them, and I think he did a very good bid for them.
And I thought it was very funny, because I thought his strongest moment was when he really rattled your girl Nikki Haley.
Because she was clutching her pearls and wagging her finger, and she seemed more like she was running for President of the PTA than President of the United States.
It was like he really got under her skin and I thought that was hilarious.
I said to you earlier this morning, she strikes me as the dark horse because she to me would come across exactly as she came across tonight, which was she's a functional adult.
You may disagree with her on some things and agree with her on some things, but she's got, I think, a fairly good track record as governor and as U.S.
ambassador to the U.N., and I thought she kind of did just that tonight.
Again, whether you agree or disagree, I know you fully disagree with her on Ukraine, for example.
The point is 2024 is going to be a year about imprisoning political opponents, trans kids, how much money we spend in Ukraine.
Responsibility is not what the Republican electorate wants.
This would have made a lot of sense in 2012.
If you had her versus Romney, everyone's going for her because she's got all of Romney's benefits and none of his faults.
But in terms of where the Republican Party in America is today, just after what happened with COVID and the madness there, I think that she's really out of her time.
No, so they bring him out, and I don't know if they showed this part on TV.
I don't know if you saw everybody walk out.
But, you know, he's got a limp because something happened to either his leg or his back while playing basketball yesterday, and I respect the basketball injury.
I thought his answers were actually pretty solid, and he's obviously, like, kind of a, I would say, like, decent conservative.
When you start talking about how great teachers are and how they're underpaid in this country, the teachers union, I think Republican voters understand, is one of the biggest—in my opinion, they're a bigger threat to America than China is, by far, what they're doing to the kids and the sanctimoniousness and the absolute depravity coming out of some of these schools.
So for them to be like, you know, we need to support more teachers— Get the hell out of here.
You know, that sort of whisper, half-whisper, sort of preacher, not preacher.
Again, I've interviewed him.
I think he is a decent man.
I only tweeted once during the entire debate about the debate itself, and I said, you know, whether you agree with these guys or not, whether you like them or not, these people, they seemingly do like America.
Now, they may not love it the exact way that we would want them to or something like that, That's very different than, I think, if you put eight Democrats on stage now, where they fundamentally don't think.
He's the diversity hire for the Republican Party, I think.
And he has no good public speaking either, or a resume to speak of.
I think it's just embarrassing that he's kind of up there, and I don't see any future for him, other than maybe in some cabinet for some non-Trump Republican president down the road.
Because if I'm investing money in a candidate, I want this guy to be bought and paid for, I gotta make sure he can go on stage and fight for me and get some noise and get unearned media and things like that.
I think a lot of our big debates aren't even really susceptible to that.
Like, Big Tech collaborating with the United States government to control the internet.
Is that a left or is that a right issue?
Yeah, imperialism, the war in Ukraine, I think some of these things just evade these labels, so I think they've become less and less important, but I don't think I've changed my worldview or core ideology in any way.
I think a lot has changed around me, like it has for you.
So I'll just recap real quick what our basic assessment was.
You can clean up some of this for me.
We sort of thought it was just like a push for DeSantis, and he thinks a push is sort of a loss, and that there were no major wins there, but no major losses.
Yeah, I mean when you're behind by 30 to 40 points and your campaign is struggling, not collapsing but struggling by all metrics, you need something to change course and I don't think there was a moment where he did that.
Probably it's the first time people are seeing him in this setting so maybe he was obviously competent, there was no failures.
Open up some people's minds.
By far the thing that impressed me the most, and by impressed I just mean the thing that I thought was the biggest takeaway, was how much attention was paid to Vivek.
He got the entire debate to center on him in a way that I think was pretty remarkable given that he's the only one out there not a known political commodity.
Yeah, did you feel like some of the gimmick portion of it kind of worked at the beginning and then sort of ran lost steam?
Like, at the beginning it came out he's very animated, he's young, you know, it's like his arms are flying all over the place, he looks different, and it was kind of working.
I think the one line that really hit him though, I just said this to Michael, this thing about you're all bought and sold and I'm not, like, that does feel a little, like, come on, man.
How do you gauge, so I think the three of us are pretty, you know, I don't fully consider myself in isolation, but the three of us are pretty, yeah, we'll get to that in a sec, but on the Vivek stuff with the war, like, I think the three of us are pretty anti-war, certainly, right?
So, do you think that most Americans are, though?
Because, you know, Pence got a lot of applause on Ukraine stuff.
I'm shocked that Pence basically invoked domino policy, which was the reason we were in Vietnam.
Because the argument is, if we don't stop them in Vietnam, then they're going to Laos, then they're going to Cambodia, they're coming to Washington, they're coming to Oklahoma.
And that literally, I forget who was who said that, if we don't stop them in Ukraine, we're next.
I mean, I think that what the polling is showing is that the Republican Party adores Donald Trump.
There's no getting around that, right?
Not all of them, obviously.
The biggest chunk of Republican Party voters still really, really like Donald Trump.
And if you're perceiving yourself as the anti-Trump candidate, which Chris Christie clearly is, going on ABC and CNN for no reason other than to bash Trump and saying he's below the dignity of the, you know, that is something that I think is just going to turn Republican voters.
I mean, DeSantis, you notice, is very careful.
You know, never to really say, even that Trump's guilty, his focus, every time he's asked on the corruption and weaponization of the Biden Justice Department, he doesn't want to alienate Trump voters because I think he knows that he can't get the nomination if he does, whereas Chris Christie is there just to bash Trump for whatever motives Chris Christie has in doing that.
Yeah, I mean, it was a debate in a parallel universe where Donald Trump's not running, right?
Look, I'm somebody who, as a journalist, is somebody who thinks people running for president have a responsibility to respect, you know, the voters.
I think he should be here.
I think if you're going to run for president, you should participate in the debates.
That said, it just is a long-standing rule of American politics that if you have a gigantic lead, you don't elevate the stature of your opponents trailing far behind by debating them.
It's a strategic calculation.
It's a political calculation.
Therefore, it's not one that I love.
I wish he were here, but I kind of get why he's not.
And it's also a legal calculation, because if he's on stage being asked questions about all his indictments, which he would certainly have to be asked, he's in a position where if he's saying things publicly that screw up his legal cases, this could have criminal ramifications.
Any lawyer will tell you, when you're involved in a legal case, you do not discuss it publicly and let your lawyers do it.
I think it's unbelievable that every time a country we regard as an adversary country, sometimes even ones we regard as allies, start indicting and criminalizing political opponents,
we instantly see that as a hallmark of tyranny.
You know, one of the main issues that I had when I first started writing about politics
in the early war on terror, was I thought that a lot of Bush Cheney officials
and even CIA officials ought to have been prosecuted for war on terror crimes, for torture, for rendition,
for illegal eavesdropping with no warrants.
And the consensus in the political media class was, we don't do that, that's what banana republics do.
I wrote a book saying, actually, banana republics, there's a two-tiered system of law
where elites are exempt and don't get prosecuted.
The problem is, I'd be cheering if we were really abandoning this two-tiered system
of justice where political leaders are exempt.
Of course, though, we're not.
It's a one-time only exemption for Trump.
It's totally politically motivated.
I'd be cheering prosecution of Trump if he had committed classic crimes like murder or extortion or bribery or, you know, kidnapping or just the kind of classic corruption that politicians should go to jail for.
None of that Do you think even if he did do some things that were illegal or with classified arguments or talking about them, like if there are some things let's say on the margins that he did that are illegal, would you still make the argument?
Because I kind of would, that you still have to let him off because otherwise we end up in Banana Republic regardless.
So if you ask me, just from a lawyer perspective, which of the four cases are the strongest, I would easily say the Mar-a-Lago case with the classified documents, just because that doesn't actually require this dubious interpretation of the law.
But the thing is, Every single day, I mean literally every day, if you pick up the New York Times or the Washington Post, you will read people leaking classified documents.
So you turn on the TV and you see these people, these panels, expressing indignation that he was careless.
These people are playing games with classified information, way more sensitive than the ones he's accused, by the way, not of leaking, but of improperly maintaining.
And when you add on to that the fact that everyone agrees, as president, he had the unilateral and unreviewable power to declassify them, ultimately the whole case comes down to, and again this is the strongest one, Nothing more than just kind of like a bureaucratic oversight that like he kind of forgot or failed to declassify those documents prior to taking them.
If that's the thing on which we're staking the prosecution of the leading oppositional figure in the United States, I don't really care whether he did it or not.
That is way beyond what is a tolerable use of the police power.
Well, that's the Noam Chomsky argument, the famous one, that if we ever even applied just the Nuremberg principles, let alone American domestic law, every American president in the post-World War II era would be prosecuted and hung at the Hague.
Well, I got an invitation from someone I know who has transportation for making this sort of thing very straightforward and so we had the opportunity, Tammy and I, had the opportunity to come down and why the hell not come down, you know?
I mean it's...
It's a stunningly interesting anthropological endeavour for a Canadian.
It's great theatre and I've interviewed a lot of the candidates now and so I know them a little bit and I was fascinated to see how they would all perform.
I thought actually all things considered, and maybe it's because Canada sets such a low bar on this front, I thought that the entire slate of candidates was really quite markedly credible.
I think all of them landed at least one blow.
I don't think any of them made The sort of mistake that would make you cringe and make you think they were clearly unfit for the job.
It was a tough debate because there's eight people and you don't have a lot of time to develop your arguments.
And so, you know, I thought... I could have been far less impressed with the whole endeavor than I was.
Because, I mean, for me, like the debate, the thing that was most surprising was so much... he was able to draw all the attention to him despite being the least kind of, you know, politically established figure on that stage.
Yeah, well, it was his ability to Generate both positive and negative emotion.
Yeah excess was quite on display because I think he had the most positive and the most negative response, right?
So we had the most variability and I suppose that's part of charisma, right?
I would say He's clearly bright.
I think that some of the things he did Exemplified the utility of his youthfulness and there is some use in that now because the world's changing so quickly that being somewhat younger, at least in principle, could be advantageous.
He didn't use pause as well.
He's kind of impulsive, you know.
I don't think the insults he levied against the other candidates, I don't think any of them helped him.
That was the worst element of his performance, was that line.
And it was unfortunate to me because the reason he said that, at least in part, is because he has concentrated on A. spending his own money and B. gathering a multitude of tiny donations from very many people.
So he's not beholden to super PACs, let's say.
And I think he could have explained that to people.
Instead of using what was essentially a cheap shot What made it a cheap shot was you can't insult seven people at the same time with the same insult, right?
I don't think the audience responded to it well, and I also don't think that...
There's no reason for any of the Republican candidates to make enemies out of the people they're running against any more than is absolutely necessary.
Because, as you said, they all have a constituency.
They're all in the same boat.
And, you know, if you could land a criticism and it furthered your case, then fine.
But my sense in watching Vivek was that the The insults were not... They also highlighted his youthfulness in a way that was negative.
Because it wasn't... There was an element of it that was... Sophomoric?
I said to Malice, and you know how I feel about this, I said that for me it was basically
a push.
That there was no major win, but nobody hit him on anything at all.
So I thought that was kind of decent on his side.
But I want to ask you about Trump for a sec because you had a line with Piers Morgan about a year ago where he was asking you about whether Trump should run or not.
And you said that in essence, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but in essence it was that we have to have this out publicly because otherwise there will be too much... Well that's part of the problem with this criminal prosecution.
Well, you know, and I also think that's terribly off-brand.
And I think the same, I don't think it's off-brand with Biden, but I think it's the same kind
of mistake.
It's like, come and stomp your opponents.
Show people you can do it.
Now, I think what he did tonight, in some ways, given that he didn't show up at the debate, was brilliant strategically to go talk to Tucker tonight at the same time.
Well, but that's also partly why... Oh, that was another thing I thought too and this is relevant to Trump.
I think all the candidates... So you saw very frequently when the discussion wandered into Trump territory Especially if it was critical of Trump that the audience would respond quite negatively.
And that's interesting because most of the people here obviously aren't so enamored with Trump that they won't come to the debate.
when he sat down and Glenn and I used to be hardcore enemies on Twitter for years fighting with
each other. And you know, he was always getting into it with Sam Harris and all that stuff.
Do you find it odd that you're at a Republican debate, and you're, you know... Because I said absolutely everything about my life on... You're a Canadian psychology professor, C.G.!
But you're there and you walk in and really you got as big applause as anyone in that room that was on that stage sitting with Glenn and the anarchists over here and we've been doing our thing for years but like what an odd collection of people that are trying to make sense and whatever whether we're right or wrong about any of the stuff we're talking about This is far more closer to the truth than anything that's on CNN or MSNBC or these other places right now.
The positive side of that is that the podcasts, it's very difficult, it's very difficult to falsify a podcast.
I think, and Rogan's talked about this too, if you bring someone in and you run them out for two hours, first of all, you see if there's enough there to talk for two hours and you can't, you can't really be a persona for two hours.
Especially not on YouTube.
People figure that out real quick.
And so I think we could see a real shift in the public conception of politicians, but also politicians' conceptions of the public.
Because part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span.
You know, you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment.
Plus, the bandwidth was insanely expensive.
Now all that's gone.
So, I think that'll be a revolution in political discourse.
And I mean, because if you, I mean, of course, like 10 years ago, no serious politician would go on
podcast.
Now there's a huge number of voters, arguably a majority, who do not trust the people who you go and speak with
if you go on cable news or if you go on network news.
They trust the people who have podcasts.
The audience sizes are comparable.
And if you're unwilling to subject yourself to that, it seems exactly like you said.
Or take advantage of it.
Or take advantage of it, because Ron Sanchez is a very smart guy.
He's someone who I think would thrive in those kinds of settings.
But if you're only willing to confine yourself to the precincts of traditional Politicians, people are going to start to think that you are one of those.
And I think that's been one of the mistakes he's made.
Yeah, but he more so was dismissing the... I think picking fights with media, even Fox News now, among conservative voters, which, you know, is used to be kind of heretical and now has become a lot more acceptable
is always a winning strategy. I mean, you look at pulling down, there is nobody, no institution
that is held in greater contempt than media. That is just the reality. So great. I mean,
maybe pedophiles, if you attack them, it's a little more popular. But you were hit yourself. But
there's, you know, fighting with media where you're a very bad man, their format is a no
lose situation. I thought I actually thought that was a good and it is true. Like you ask a serious
question about climate or, you know, Um...
Fossil fuels and the only way that you're supposed to answer is by raising your hand or not.
Did you guys think it was funny that at the beginning of the debate, and again, I don't know if this was heard on television, they said to everyone in the audience, don't yell, don't jeer, but from the second it started, it just happens.
And then that does change the way people at home start feeling about some of the answers.
But I thought, yeah, I thought, And Christy was also generous in relationship to Pence and that was a good moment on his part.
And I also thought that that was something that would have showed an additional level of maturity in Vivek if he had been gracious at some point to his opponents, a few of them, to give the devil his due.
Because I think if you're confident Since we are here in America doing a debate, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about what's going on up in Canada.
Because you are in the midst of a fiasco that I have told you many times you must move to Florida.
Well, I committed the unforgivable sin of opposing transbutchery, for example, which I regard as a crime against humanity, because that's what forced sterilization is, and surgery on minors that castrates them, for example.
That's forced sterilization.
And so one of the tweets that I was pilloried for, kicked off Twitter, was a tweet directed at Elliot Page, or Ellen
Page.
Ellen Page, yes.
And someone complained about that to the College of Psychologists, and although they do not have to pursue complaints if they're
vexatious, they decided they would pursue that and 13 others, 7 of
which they dropped.
And all of them are political.
It's so interesting to see this.
It's fascinating.
First of all, they were levied by people who claimed falsely to be clients of mine, which they weren't, in writing.
But more importantly, two criticisms of Trudeau, One criticism of his chief of staff, one criticism of a city councillor in Ottawa.
The entire transcript of my discussion with Joe Rogan, focusing mostly, the complaint was focusing mostly on the fact that I think the climate change fear mongers are tyrannical authoritarians and that almost everything they say is not only false.
Even Greta?
Even, well, maybe not Greta, because she's such a wonderful girl.
So, so, these are obviously, these are clearly political opinions.
Clearly political opinions.
And the charges that I brought the Profession of psychology into disgrace, essentially, that I've conducted myself unprofessionally.
The fact that ten million people have bought my books and have regarded them as helpful seems to be absolutely irrelevant in contrast to the fact that six people in six years have complained about me.
I remember back in the day, 2009-2010, when I was very much associated on the left, there was that case of Ezra Levant and another with Mark Stein, where they were both brought up on administrative charges under the Human Rights Law.
I defended each of them, and they were surprised, but that was always part of my worldview.
Absolutely, just completely now unraveling everywhere in the democratic world.
I live in Brazil where they're destroying people's lives, they're preventing them from going on the internet, people who make their living as podcasters, and there's no pretense any longer that it's because of anything but political views.
It's becoming increasingly explicit.
That hate speech and disinformation is being dispensed with.
These people have ideas that are dangerous and destabilizing to society and therefore we can't allow them.
And the public opinion in support of this is really alarming.
I mean there's no public resistance, not none, but not a lot, not nearly what it should be.
Canadians, the thing about Canadians is that for about 175 years we could take for granted the fundamental integrity of our institutions.
So when I For most of my life, the socialists were a labor party.
They were all union guys, so they had something to say.
They were union guys.
The liberals were centrists, and they played the left and the right and took the best ideas from both and generally governed.
The conservatives were the party of big business.
Everyone knew that, and essentially everybody played that game.
The education system worked reasonably well.
At least it wasn't corrupt.
Both the public education system and the higher education system.
Canada's a pretty damn functional country.
Even the CBC was fundamentally the same kind of credible news source that the BBC was, you know, 15 years ago.
And all of that's inverted.
And the same's the case of the judiciary.
And Canadians... Think about what they're being asked to swallow.
Either someone like me knows what the hell's going on, Or, no, either someone like me is wrong, or all of the institutions in Canada have become dangerously corrupt.
Well, who the hell's going to believe the second one?
Don't you think also the internet and the free flow of information is a huge threat to their power?
Because if you have to defend your ideas in a free market of discourse and so on and so forth, if you're building an empire based on lies, as soon as I catch you at one, two, three lies, they start crumbling down.
So they have to kind of double down to maintain their hegemony.
Well, some of that, some of that's obviously the case in relationship to how the legacy media has degenerated because part of the reason they degenerate is like, well, how can they not degenerate?
How can you compete with YouTube?
YouTube is free and billions of people are its audience.
game over on the network side, obviously, because you can't compete with that.
And then the networks start losing their good people, especially their great people, and
once you lose your great people, well, you have mediocre people, and then the mediocre
people get more desperate, and then they lose their editorial staff, and they lose their
foreign correspondence, and then they devolve to clickbait, and, you know, part of that's
just technological transformation.
And so, you add that to the warping of the educational institutions, and I would also say, you know, that the social media landscape does facilitate public discourse in a remarkable way.
I think that's especially true of video forums like YouTube and Rumble, but it also facilitates the divisive psychopaths in a way that normal
For me, I think, like, one of the accelerants, for sure, was the summer where, first, you had the British people rejecting what they were told to do and leaving the European Union with Brexit.
And I think at the end of that, there was a decision we can no longer trust.
Westerners with the freedom that the internet has been given, that we've been given them, and that I think was when the crackdown really became persuasive.
But they're right from their perspective.
No, I think they made a rational judgment that things were spiraling out of their control and they needed to regain it.