Oct. 15, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
49:39
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I don't think competency is the driving factor, but I see the calculation a little differently. | ||
| I think that what we need is the person who can get elected. | ||
| Like, if you want Joe Biden out, and I do, I've been open about it for the reasons I stated, You have to go with whoever is most likely to do that. | ||
| And I know that Nikki Haley's supporters think it's her and Ron DeSantis' supporters think it's him. | ||
| But my calculation as somebody who would take any of those guys, or gals, is you gotta get the one who can bring together the biggest coalition. | ||
| And the Trump coalition is never leaving Trump. | ||
| They're just not going to leave him. | ||
| So I think the rest of the coalition is probably going to migrate over to them because they're immovable. | ||
| I just see that as their reality. | ||
| So eventually the rest, they're just going to have to bend to the Trump coalition's will because the Trump voters are not gettable. | ||
| That's some 25 to 35% depending on who you believe. | ||
| They're just never going to move. | ||
| And the Republicans need to win. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Dave Rubin. | |
| This is The Rubin Report. | ||
| This woman just does not need an introduction. | ||
| Megyn Kelly, my friend and actual, I'm gonna consider you a journalist. | ||
| I'm not sure that's what you consider yourself anymore. | ||
| Hello, how are you, my friend? | ||
| Hi, I'm good. | ||
| How you doing, Dave? | ||
| I'm all right, I'm all right. | ||
| I think it's actually perfectly fitting to have you on the show this week. | ||
| We were supposed to do this a couple weeks ago, and then I think both our schedules went a little wacky. | ||
| But to have you on today, obviously right in the middle of this Israel-Hamas thing, and just sort of Really what I want to focus on, I guess, and then we can, you know me, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about, is sort of like the media reaction to this and how we're seeing like a new type of war unfold online. | ||
| And if it wasn't for Twitter right now, and you know, if it was the old days for you back at your corporate job at Fox, how maybe you'd have to cover it differently or even at NBC during that stint. | ||
| So maybe kind of take it from there, like, well, first off, what do you make of the last couple of days, just kind of broadly, and then we'll kind of try to narrow it. | ||
| You know, it reminds me of like 2015. | ||
| I think that's the right year when ISIS was getting really aggressive in the Middle East and you go on the air at night and ask yourself, can I repeat any of this? | ||
| Can I show any of this video? | ||
| This is so Beyond the pale, it's so evil. | ||
| We're not going to show them burning people alive in cages. | ||
| We're just not going to do that. | ||
| And there were certain lines that you wouldn't cross as a news organization, you know, on cable. | ||
| And I'm having that same feeling now. | ||
| Like, Can you show the absolute rape and murder and torture of human beings in Israel? | ||
| Should we? | ||
| And I've been watching my friends in the media make their own decisions in our digital lane, which has different rules now. | ||
| You do have more freedom if you make the editorial choice to show it. | ||
| And we've been debating it internally. | ||
| We can show it, it's just there's only so much the human heart can take. | ||
| I'm sure you, because I know you've got people you love there, But even I, as somebody who's got more distance between me and Israel and the actual events, but just as a supporter of Israel, have been walking around with just such a heavy heart over the past few days. | ||
| It's affecting everything. | ||
| It's affecting the way I'm interacting with my family, with my friends, you know, my sleeping. | ||
| That's with all the distance in the world between me and the events. | ||
| Every inch closer and it's even harder. | ||
| So at some point I do think over here we've been showing some of the tapes, not all. | ||
| You know, you have to make a decision to protect yourself and your well-being and be able to report on it, you know, without feeling the heaviness of it. | ||
| Otherwise, you can't get through it. | ||
| You saw that reporter, the Israeli reporter today, trying to report, you know, as a professional, on the babies. | ||
| You know, a phrase, I don't know if it's ever been uttered before in news coverage anywhere. | ||
| Decapitated babies? | ||
| I don't know if anybody had ever even considered that horror. | ||
| And then you find 40? | ||
| Like, how do you go on with your life? | ||
| How do you do anything other than take up arms against these people? | ||
| And so I fully understand what I am seeing online with people saying, Gaza must be razed. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| There should be no more Gaza. | ||
| It should look like a parking lot when Israel is done with it. | ||
| That is how I feel too and the only thing that would dissuade me from that feeling is if it's going to lead to more destruction for Israel and her allies. | ||
| You know, if it's going to provoke Iran or Hezbollah even more and cause more headaches for Israel because that to me seems like the only quote proportionate response to what's being done. | ||
| Yeah, proportionate. | ||
| I've really come to hate that word. | ||
| It's a disproportionate response. | ||
| It's, oh, so you murdered and raped and burned and beheaded our children and our women and everything else, let's say 1,000. | ||
| Can we get 1,000 of your people so we can proportionately do those same things? | ||
| I mean, how much of this, now that you're on this side, on the media side, where you fully, I know that everything, well, even when you were on Fox, I know you personally, so I know everything was coming out of you, Megyn Kelly, yourself, and you were saying what you believed. | ||
| But now in the total freedom to do this the way you want and have those conversations with your guys about how How much of this can we show and how much can I deal with and everything else? | ||
| How different is that then maybe when you were in the corporate side of things? | ||
| I mean, I will say that when I was at Fox, they were very pro-Israel and they were never hesitant to show what was being done to Israel by its enemies, Hamas included. | ||
| So I never felt constrained there. | ||
| And certainly when ISIS was enacting its atrocities, We didn't show everything. | ||
| Again, it's just too much, and there are rules on cable. | ||
| But we showed a lot, and we didn't go easy on them. | ||
| At NBC, I was lucky enough not to have this kind of thing pop up in my very limited time there, nor would they have been expecting the 9 a.m. | ||
| show to do it, so I wasn't forced into this kind of decision-making. | ||
| So I think that's fortunate for me. | ||
| I'm seeing it more right now with the mainstream media and the editorial choices they're making. | ||
| They're going and have gone exactly the same way that we saw them go during BLM, during these other, you know, massive conflicts that have divided us. | ||
| And this just shouldn't be one. | ||
| This just, this just shouldn't be one. | ||
| This should just be, like, there's a reason Joe Biden sounds, for the most part, like you and me right now. | ||
| I know, it was shocking. | ||
| There's very few things. | ||
| It was shocking. | ||
| It was right before we were taping this, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, or we would all sound the same. | ||
| Now, we can talk about his remarks, and I don't think he went far enough, but his core message was a good one, and I agreed with what he was saying. | ||
| What's happening where you and Mark Levin and I and the guy who runs the ADL, the green-black guy, All agree, but the Washington Post and Forbes and all the college campus groups are saying something very different. | ||
| It's like the media and the academy that's been co-opted by the wokest of the woke, and as we've known for some time, that doesn't include Jews. | ||
| It doesn't include Jewish people. | ||
| As Barry Weiss once put it to me, We don't rate. | ||
| We don't count. | ||
| We're not on the list of protected classes, even though we are technically a protected class. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, you can't have a minority that succeeds. | ||
| It breaks the entire intersectional calculator. | ||
| They like their minorities on their knees basically forever. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of how it works. | ||
| Coming from, I just wanna hit the mainstream media thing one more time, because I actually think that this moment is like, to me, it's actually causing a massive shift, almost the final shift in what we needed, where the mainstream media will not be relevant anymore, and the online will be. | ||
| But I'm also a little concerned, because you know, there's an awful lot of people who talk for a living, that have no idea what they're talking about, and know nothing about history, and have huge audiences, and confuse people, either intentionally or not. | ||
| What do you think we do about that? | ||
| Like, we can bash mainstream media all day long, and this or that, but what do we do about this other thing, where it's like, you're pretty damn good, and you're on the short list of people I trust, and I guess a couple people like me, but like, we're not perfect, and now people are going to anybody that has a webcam, which is basically everybody. | ||
| Well, and on X, formerly known as Twitter, it's a similar problem in that now that it's been monetized, you get more money if you've signed up for that, which I haven't. | ||
| You get more money if you get more engagement. | ||
| So it's in your interest to just be as provocative as possible, and you line your pockets that way. | ||
| So that's problematic. | ||
| I mean, I'm a capitalist. | ||
| I'm not against people making money, but the system is set up in a fraught way. | ||
| And you could argue the same is true writ large. | ||
| You know, cable news does better if it bleeds, it leads, that kind of thing. | ||
| And so you have to find, ideally, somebody who, I mean, you've done very well, I've done very well. | ||
| I don't need this paycheck in order to survive. | ||
| I need my integrity to look at myself in the mirror every morning. | ||
| So you have to find a person like that. | ||
| It doesn't have to be me or you, but you have to figure out whether this person's there for dollars. | ||
| Or whether they're an honest broker and whether they tell you the things you don't want to hear, even when it hurts what you know is the anchor or the host's side, right? | ||
| That's how I would make my decision. | ||
| But on something this complex, you really do need to be choosy about where you get your info. | ||
| I mean, most of these anchors on CNN or MSNBC, forget that, are, you know, A bunch of twits who have absolutely no education on any of this stuff and are too lazy to do their homework. | ||
| They want to be stars, Dave. | ||
| They don't want to actually be your guide through something as complex as the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. | ||
| They don't want to do a deep dive on Hamas and Gaza and what happened in 2005 and what happened, you know, who started bombing who first and why and why the blockade was put into place. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| They want what gets them clicks and what gets you clicks amongst the young people today is to say that Israel is a colonializer and that they're the oppressor and that you're on the side of the oppressed because that's what's hip today. | ||
| You're a BLM-er and they're oppressed and you're on the side of the LGBTQ people because they're the oppressors, they're not aggressors and therefore you're on the side of the Palestinians slash Hamas, the poor Hamas oppressed people who live in the new term quote an open-air prison. | ||
| Gaze for Palestine is very different than Palestine for gays. | ||
| That's what I always tell everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, come on, come on. | |
| Just a simple Google search would help you out so much before you, these idiotic posts, young people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, does it seem to you in a way that the reason we got to this moment was not just Well, putting aside like there are genocidal organizations and there's hate and like that kind of stuff, but this moment now where we're at with media and where we're at with confusing children about their gender and where we're at with open borders, like all of the stuff that this was obviously going to be where we were gonna get to at some point, like that's what I've been feeling the last couple of days. | ||
| Like suddenly it's here. | ||
| It feels like something new is here. | ||
| And I've sort of been just like, oh, of course we were going to get here. | ||
| What did you think when I see the Hamas rallies in New York, in Times Square? | ||
| It's like, well, of course that was going to happen if you have open borders and you don't defend your culture and all of those things. | ||
| And maybe that makes me sound like crazy right-wing Mark Levin now, but here we are. | ||
| That's obviously sarcasm. | ||
| No, it's a good point. | ||
| I've been thinking about, I had to go through my phone recently and I had to find this old picture of my now 14-year-old son, like a baby picture. | ||
| So it required me to scroll through what you're going through right now, right? | ||
| All the fun baby videos. | ||
| And on there was a video of my daughter who was six when Trump was elected. | ||
| And my daughter at the time did not like Trump because as she put in her little video, he bullied my mom. | ||
| That's how she, she was six. | ||
| I always said to you, you get like a full pass and I'll grant that pass to your daughter as well. | ||
| So she's come around, but at the time she was not his fan. | ||
| And she was saying in this little piece, he shouldn't be president. | ||
| Can you change presidents? | ||
| So she wasn't his fan. | ||
| And honestly, for some reason, every time I look at Joe Biden, that is what I think right now. | ||
| He shouldn't be president. | ||
| Can you change presidents? | ||
| Like, how soon could we get Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy? | ||
| I don't give a damn. | ||
| Any of them. | ||
| How soon can we get them in there? | ||
| Because you can feel us losing it, like all of it, by the second. | ||
| You know, like you say, from the very simple premise that we don't hurt our children. We don't | ||
| voluntarily allow our children to cut off body parts and sterilize themselves and become essentially asexual | ||
| when they're 15 because they're going through a phase. We don't do that. That's | ||
| something only lunatics would do. | ||
| And we certainly protect our border to the point where we don't have cities overrun with migrants. | ||
| And like New York, where you have to get a translator for every single language that | ||
| appears in your publicly funded school, where you've paid your taxes and they haven't, | ||
| and now your kid's got to wait in a line for an hour to enter the classroom, where then he will | ||
| be told about sexuality and asked whether he really is a she and given a book about blow | ||
| jobs that you only wanted to get through the third grade without reading. Like that's. | ||
| That's our country. | ||
| And then you walk out of Times Square from this public city school and you see babies having been beheaded in Israel, and the next thing you see is some group chanting, like, gas the gays or gas the Jews. | ||
| It's the same. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Right? | ||
| What? | ||
| Wait, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| So it's very jarring. | ||
| And you and I have something in common, which is we try to maintain our sense of humor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This has been critical to staying a well person and staying, I think, in this lane that we're in and still having people want to listen to us. | ||
| Because it can't be all dark and awfulness. | ||
| And in these moments, it's very hard to laugh. | ||
| You know, when you came and you did the, on my book tour, you did the show in West Nyack, which was one of the best nights of the entire tour because it was you and it was the one New York show, which was my home. | ||
| I once lived in New York before I lived in the free state of Florida. | ||
| And you described me on stage as a happy warrior. | ||
| And I guess I never really thought of myself that way. | ||
| But I think that I ultimately am. | ||
| And I have to say, in doing my show this week, this is the hardest it has ever been in my life. | ||
| I mean, I literally, on Monday, I walked out of the studio and I cried. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Do you ever find that? | ||
| Like, how did it be that Megyn Kelly ended up being one of the people that is gonna make sense of the world in a time where no one's making any sense? | ||
| Like, for you personally, how it became you. | ||
| I mean, it's very hard. | ||
| These days and weeks are very, very hard. | ||
| But I do think it's important to not forget your humanity. | ||
| I know I told this story in my book, and I told it for a reason, but there was a moment on 9-11, where on Good Morning America, it was Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson anchoring. | ||
| And as the tower went down, the first tower went down, Charlie Gibson had the glasses at the end of the nose and was the network anchor and just continued reporting. | ||
| The tower appears to have fallen. | ||
| You know, the number of the loss of life will be significant. | ||
| And and Diane Sawyer said, Oh, my God. | ||
| And it was a lesson. | ||
| He regretted his response and wished it had been more like hers. | ||
| She didn't forget her humanity in the moment. | ||
| She did go on to report all those things that he was saying and maintained her professionalism. | ||
| In these moments, it's okay to still be a human being, and I actually think it's important to still be a human being. | ||
| Like, yesterday, we opened the show with a description of what the latest was, you know, the horrors out of Israel, and I'll just tell you the truth. | ||
| After the show was over, we always do like a, you know, a post-game meeting with the team, and I was critical of the way we set up the show, because we did this very Tug at your heartstrings intro, all of which was true and real and proper, and then we went right to Ted Cruz, who I like. | ||
| But what Ted Cruz really wanted to talk about was politics and the Biden administration, all of which was good, but what we needed was a moment to sigh and think and reflect and talk about how we were feeling. | ||
| Just a minute. | ||
| You don't have to spend an hour, but just a minute. | ||
| Instead of getting right to the hardness of it all. | ||
| And I do think those moments are what help us remain happy warriors. | ||
| Dave, you know, it's like you can't go right to anger on any of these stories. | ||
| You do have to spend some time in your humanity and allow the feelings to be felt and then find a way through. | ||
| You don't deal with it unless you go through it. | ||
| Do you think we will, like, do you now think we're just in this for a while? | ||
| Like, do you sense that sort of shift that I'm talking about in the world? | ||
| That, like, I just don't think that this thing's going away for a while. | ||
| I don't even mean just the specifics of the violence. | ||
| I mean just, like, whatever it is now unearthing. | ||
| I sense we're in it for a while, and then you throw in a presidential election, which is still 13 months away. | ||
| I mean, everyone thinks it's tomorrow, and it's 13 months away. | ||
| Like, it seems to me we're now stuck for a bit. | ||
| Yeah, I think for a bit, but I am very hopeful that a change in leadership at the top can change things. | ||
| I really, I am. | ||
| Now look, I'll be honest, Trump brings with him such a bag of, you know, baggage that that will add a new level of chaos to it all. | ||
| There's just no question about that. | ||
| So I do think another Republican leader would probably bring less, less of that chaos, but Who's kidding whom? | ||
| If President Trump were in the office right now, do any of us believe this would have happened? | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| As critical as I have been. | ||
| I don't think Ukraine... Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Right? | ||
| 100% I'm with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We wouldn't have had Afghanistan? | ||
| And I realize he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but I don't believe for one second that he would have done it the way that Joe Biden did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No way. | |
| And I think he would have changed his mind if he had seen any sort of wobbling. | ||
| I don't think we would have had Afghanistan, I don't think we would have had Russia and Ukraine, and I don't think we would have had this atrocity with Hamas. | ||
| And I do think Trump's instability, you know, in messaging, in temperament, when it came to foreign policy was a benefit to us. | ||
| You know, Rick Grinnell tells the story of how Angela Merkel looked in his eyes and said, like, I don't know what your guy's going to do next. | ||
| And he had to stop himself from smiling, you know, and bombing Soleimani. | ||
| The Iranians didn't know what to do. | ||
| They were afraid. | ||
| They were like, holy shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bomb Soleimani. | ||
| And they were too weak and too afraid of him and us to do anything in response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Everyone said it was going to start World War III. | ||
| There are pluses and minuses of the guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everyone said it was going to start World War III. | ||
| And it gave us actually three years of peace and how many Mideast peace deals and the rest of it. | ||
| So all of this Dave is by way of saying, I am optimistic that we can regain stasis, that we can regain a steadiness that has been missing for the past couple of years. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure that what we're feeling right now is akin to what our parents were feeling in the 70s after a couple of years under Jimmy Carter. | ||
| That instability starts at a very high level and trickles down. | ||
| He's been pushing all this shit. | ||
| He opened the border. | ||
| He's allowing this myth about boys becoming girls and rewarding it being taught in schools. | ||
| He's pushing the racial essentialism and dividing us from, you know, K through 12 and beyond in the classroom. | ||
| He and his allies in academia, even corporate America and beyond, are festering, allowing to fester these lies which are dividing us and making us feel disconnected. | ||
| Patriotism on the way down, religious observance on the way down, and the weakness being projected on the foreign policy front. | ||
| I really think a lot of it starts with the American president and it was a severe mistake for Americans to put him in office. | ||
| Who do you think is driving that? | ||
| Because I think you basically said this already, you don't believe that Biden's really driving the ship right now. | ||
| There's some other, you know, everyone has their own theory on this, whether it's Obama in a Biden costume, or it's the Obama people, or just like some version of something. | ||
| This does not seem like Joe Biden is in charge. | ||
| I think someone basically hands him notes, he poorly reads them, fumbles off the stage, and then we just do it again the next day. | ||
| Do you have a sense of really where this is coming from? | ||
| I wish I knew. | ||
| I mean, my best guess is if it's not Obama himself, it's all of his disciples, because that's who Joe Biden hired. | ||
| And you remember that one appearance where Obama came back to the White House and how the entire staff ignored Biden and went right over to Obama? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| That was very telling. | ||
| But I really, I wish I knew. | ||
| I don't think it is Joe Biden. | ||
| And I don't think, you know, I go back to things like All of the rewards that he's creating or trying to create at the college level, scholarships and so on, for people who write just the perfect BLM message, who major in Ibram X. Kendi nonsense. | ||
| You know, he's doing this. | ||
| He's trying. | ||
| That's not Joe Biden. | ||
| He's the biggest racist elected to president in, I don't know, a good 25 years. | ||
| Well, we got our clip for today's show. | ||
| Seriously! | ||
| I mean, the week goes by that he doesn't say a new racist thing. | ||
| He's not pushing BLM nonsense. | ||
| So who is that? | ||
| I think it's the leftover woke Obama crew. | ||
| I mean, look at Obama. | ||
| How long did it take him? | ||
| 48 hours? | ||
| To even bother to put together some anodyne tweet on these atrocities? | ||
| Like, his heart wasn't in it. | ||
| So, I don't really know the answer, Dave. | ||
| I wish I did. | ||
| You know, the closest I've seen is that Easter Bunny, who he really seemed to listen to, but I don't know who's inside the costume. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, it's Obama in the Easter bunny costume. | ||
| It really could be. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, because it's also like, it's something that's, it's why everyone's going nuts, basically. | ||
| That's what I think, is that we all know these things that are so obvious, like Joe Biden's not running it, and that boys actually are boys and girls are girls, but we're so hit with these things, and then the entire class of people who were supposed to say the truth, they all completely failed, and then we're just like, Well, yes, beheading women is okay because everything else is broken. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Like, that's really where I think we're at. | ||
| This is what's so crazy. | ||
| I mean, that sounds like a laugh line, like you just taking something that actually happened and making an absurdity out of it. | ||
| That actually is happening. | ||
| The women, the babies, they are being murdered, they are being beheaded, the elderly ladies sitting and waiting for the bus are being shot multiple times by machine guns, and they're posting the pictures online, and then Washington Post journalists are liking tweets that say, what did you think decolonization meant? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Did you think it meant vibes? | ||
| Losers. | ||
| That happened. | ||
| Her name is Karen Attia. | ||
| She writes for the Washington Post. | ||
| I follow her. | ||
| You know why I follow her? | ||
| Because she's a BLM supporter. | ||
| She's with Kendi and D'Angelo and all the lunatics. | ||
| But I like to get the viewpoints of people who I disagree with. | ||
| And she's one of them, but she seems like in her personal life kind of a nice person. | ||
| She posts pictures of her cat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She posts pictures of her workout. | |
| She expresses insecurities from time to time. | ||
| I do it for an intentional purpose. | ||
| I like to remind myself that my adversaries on policy or ideologically are not necessarily evil. | ||
| They're We disagree very strongly, but like, I like to like some of her posts about her cat, Dave. | ||
| I don't have a cat. | ||
| I'm a dog person. | ||
| But I'm just saying, like, it makes me feel good that I can still see the humanity in this person. | ||
| It's just my own personal, private thing. | ||
| This person liked the tweet from this lunatic activist saying what I just said about decolonization. | ||
| This is what it looks like. | ||
| You're a loser if you don't understand it. | ||
| OK, babies are being decapitated, so you can fuck right off. | ||
| Fuck your cat and your tweet. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Unfollow. | ||
| This is the thing that was a bridge too far for me. | ||
| I can understand differences on all the other stuff. | ||
| And it's not even about exactly the Jewish thing. | ||
| It's about the humanity thing. | ||
| You know, like, where is your humanity? | ||
| I don't get how you can look at that beautiful group of Israelis dancing at the rave for peace. | ||
| That's what they said they were out there for, having a good time. | ||
| It's like only a 22-year-old can do out under the open sky and see them murdered in the absolute, not even the prime of their life, in the part of the life where everything is yet to be enjoyed. | ||
| And say, haha, that's a win. | ||
| Yeah, you go. | ||
| I don't have anything in common with those people. | ||
| I can't like anything about them. | ||
| In my own head, it feels like it's war. | ||
| It's on. | ||
| You're despicable. | ||
| You know, no one ever gets to the end of the argument, and I think Megyn Kelly just got to the end of the argument, and it's so freaking refreshing. | ||
| I didn't say the F-bomb because I've dropped it like 20 times on my show in the last two days, so I'm glad that you handled it for me. | ||
| Okay, so I get you on those people, but what do you think we do about, now we have what I refer to as the Hamas caucus. | ||
| We have AOC, we have Rashida Tlaib, we have Ilhan Omar, and the rest of them. | ||
| What's the other one's name? | ||
| I got it. | ||
| Yeah, Cori Bush, et cetera. | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| She's such a faker. | ||
| At least a couple of those are Palestinian-American. | ||
| Cori Bush, she's like living out of her car and posting BLM slogans two minutes ago. | ||
| Now she wants us to look at her as an authority on Israel-Palestine? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure, Jan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But what do we do about these people? | ||
| Look, you know how I feel about free speech, but I think we are getting perilously close. | ||
| Where if you constantly defend people who are calling for genocide and murder and beheading babies and everything else, and always excusing it, and then you connect that to the people that are in Times Square calling for all these things and showing Nazi flags, I don't think this is exactly the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, and the NAACP standing up for them anymore. | ||
| I don't think that's where we're at. | ||
| I think we're veering into something else. | ||
| What do you think, what do we do about this? | ||
| Do you think their allegiance is to the constitution that they swore to protect? | ||
| Um, I, I'll say this. | ||
| My first instinct is I like that they're posting these tweets. | ||
| It completely exposes them in a way that, you know, few other, like they've done controversial things. | ||
| It's been pretty clear. | ||
| People like Ilhan Omar are antisemites for a long time if you've been paying attention, but this is just so clear. | ||
| Like it's kind of, Good to see them posting these statements and really taking away all doubt. | ||
| It's wonderful, actually. | ||
| Now, we'll always have these statements, so we can always dismiss all of their arguments, because we understand that these are vile people. | ||
| And anybody who is persuadable will agree with us. | ||
| Anybody who doesn't agree with us, we know that they're in the club, too. | ||
| They're also anti-Semites. | ||
| There's absolutely no reason to support what they're saying right now. | ||
| So I kind of like the fact that they have a forum and that they're being exposed. | ||
| I find it much more problematic at the universities that we have hundreds and hundreds of students coming forward to blame Israel for all of it. | ||
| That's what Harvard says. | ||
| Harvard says we raise tomorrow's leaders. | ||
| And they're not entirely wrong. | ||
| And for them to have 31 student groups blaming Israel for all of this, and it's not just Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Northwestern, George Washington, I could keep going. | ||
| Putting out statements, and then, in some of these cases, the university president says nothing in response. | ||
| We're seeing it at the high school level, too. | ||
| Students coming out who don't know Jack trying to make supportive statements of Palestine, of Hamas. | ||
| They don't know what they're doing. | ||
| So that actually is problematic to me, because those people are going to move into positions of power, real power. | ||
| The squad is marginalized. | ||
| For all of the bad she did, Nancy Pelosi kept them marginalized, and that was one win in the Pelosi file. | ||
| And they're still marginalized. | ||
| They're just such a small group. | ||
| And I just think it's not totally without value to have them squawking. | ||
| So people who are sane can point to them and say, is that what you want to sign up for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that what being a Democrat is? | ||
| They serve some purpose. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you're probably giving a much, I would say clear eyed account than I'm giving of them, because I think you're probably right. | ||
| And I have shared some of their stuff purely with the attention of, OK, here they are. | ||
| All right. | ||
| This is them. | ||
| You know, what are we going to do? | ||
| We're not going to jail them. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| I don't want to get too much into the Trump-DeSantis thing and all that, but I do want to ask you a little bit about your interview with Trump because it was spectacular. | ||
| I've told you that privately and publicly, but also because he went after you personally years ago. | ||
| Your daughter did not like him and now has, I guess, come around a bit. | ||
| She's open-minded. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Well, that makes her a crazy right-winger. | ||
| You know how it is. | ||
| But can you talk a little bit about how you go into that room? | ||
| Like what you're thinking like a minute before knowing, I just know you, you want to challenge on the right things and you did, but you also don't want it to be the last time you ever sit down with him and there's always that weird moment with him where it could go in either direction. | ||
| Could you just talk just like your philosophy more than about like the specifics of the politics? | ||
| Well, I knew going in there before I even arrived at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey where he was, that it would probably be one and done. | ||
| That if I were going to do my duty as a journalist, it was going to be one and done. | ||
| Because he just doesn't allow ongoing access unless you kiss his ass. | ||
| You know, that's kind of the way it is with Trump. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| He can set the terms, you know, like it's kind of, that's how it is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You go in knowing that. | ||
| So my goal was not to please Trump because to please Trump, I would have had to abandon my journalistic duty. | ||
| But my goal was also not, I'm going to kill Trump. | ||
| I'm going to emerge with Trump's jugular. | ||
| You know, this is it. | ||
| Since it's one and done, I'm going to crush him. | ||
| I'm going to unleash all my A game and, you know, try to take them out. | ||
| No, that wasn't it either. | ||
| I wanted to do like a lively, Interesting, challenging, but also informative interview with him. | ||
| One that would have something for everybody. | ||
| So I felt when it was over that I did. | ||
| You know, there was stuff that MAGA really liked, his reflections on whether this is worth it, you know, like what he could be doing instead of this, his reflections about his family, his thoughts on Joe Biden, the difference between age and competence and all that. | ||
| Stuff that would be there for, you know, people like you who are going to vote Republican probably, but don't want Trump. | ||
| Look, if he's the nominee, I'm voting for him, obviously. | ||
| I mean, it goes without question. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then, you know, stuff, not for the liberals, but stuff that would be important to any objective interview, like his legal troubles. | ||
| And that was one of my irritants as a journalist, is just, I haven't seen anybody do a good job of challenging him on the legal troubles, and it's really been bothering me. | ||
| And I knew I had to do it, and I knew he wouldn't like it. | ||
| And sure enough, I was right. | ||
| What was the part, there were a couple moments in there that went viral, because you did end up, again, not because you were trying to get him, but you did get him on a couple things. | ||
| I mean, the gender one, you asked the most basic question, are there differences between boys and girls, and he fumbled for a good five seconds, and then offered this odd, sort of, I guess so answer, if a woman could give birth, which obviously does not decide gender, because there are obviously women who cannot give birth. | ||
| Like, was that the weirdest one for you or was there something else? | ||
| Was it more on the legal stuff or on the... I was surprised that he did not have a better answer for, can a man become a woman? | ||
| Sometimes the simplest questions are the hardest ones, you know, and he definitely got caught on that one, which wasn't a trick question. | ||
| I did not intend for it to be a trick question. | ||
| The legal stuff, I really wanted to press him a little because he continues to just say, I'm covered by the Presidential Records Act. | ||
| I'm covered. | ||
| And I just, I, you know, as a lawyer, I understand exactly the whole argument, the law and where the pitfalls are. | ||
| And he, you could see when I had him, to Trump's credit, he was smart. | ||
| He knew when I had him and he'd go to, I'm not going to answer that. | ||
| So he's getting smarter about not giving too much ammo, you know, to reporters or, by extension, prosecutors in these interviews. | ||
| He's smart. | ||
| I mean, Trump is definitely very smart. | ||
| So I knew he wasn't going to like that stuff, but he needed to be asked those questions. | ||
| And I would say the one that sort of I was laughing about most after it was over was his obsession with my debate question from 2015. | ||
| Bill! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bill! | |
| Get over it! | ||
| It's been eight years! | ||
| Move on! | ||
| He can't. | ||
| I mean, your daughter has moved on, so it's time. | ||
| It's time to move on. | ||
| What would you make of the argument? | ||
| Because, you know, there was a clip when I, I think you were on my show maybe a year ago, and we were talking about the Trump-DeSantis thing that seemed like it was gonna shake out, and it went really viral because you basically were like, look, it's Trump because nobody can defeat that monster. | ||
| And I basically said, you might be right. | ||
| I still think you might be right. | ||
| But it seems to me that right now, at this moment, for having everything we just talked about, We need someone like just like hyper competent and clear and no BS that can deliver the message without the bullshit and all of that stuff and it's very obvious to me there's a guy that can do that. | ||
| You did interview him by the way to DeSantis. | ||
| It took a little while and you were critical of him beforehand and he did it as well. | ||
| Do you think enough people care about competency anymore? | ||
| And maybe that's part of everything that we've discussed here in terms of the collapse of all this stuff that really we kind of just do want the reality show and not the competent one so we'll get exactly what we deserve. | ||
| I don't think competency is the driving factor, but I see the calculation a little differently. | ||
| I think that what we need is the person who can get elected, right? | ||
| Like if you want Joe Biden out, and I do, I've been open about it for the reasons I stated, You have to go with whoever is most likely to do that. | ||
| And I know that Nikki Haley's supporters think it's her and Ron DeSantis' supporters think it's him. | ||
| But my calculation as somebody who would take any of those guys, or gals, is you gotta get the one who can bring together the biggest coalition. | ||
| And the Trump coalition is never leaving Trump. | ||
| They're just not going to leave him. | ||
| So I think the rest of the coalition is probably going to migrate over to them because they're immovable. | ||
| I just see that as their reality. | ||
| So eventually the rest, they're just going to have to bend to the Trump coalition's will, because the Trump voters are not gettable. | ||
| That's some 25 to 35 percent, depending on who you believe. | ||
| They're just never going to move. | ||
| And the Republicans need to win. | ||
| So if they want to win, I even think like, you know, the establishment Republicans, sort of the Reagan library Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce, they're like, we can't stand that we're in this position. | ||
| We don't want Trump. | ||
| And the only thing we hate more than Trump is Biden. | ||
| So these guys on their motorcycles and in their trucks are going to drag us on over there and we're going to have to vote for the orange man again. | ||
| And my position on the outside where I am just watching it all is, OK, I guess we're going to go this way again. | ||
| It's fine as long as we don't stay on the path we're on, which I see is the most deadly, destructive possible path. | ||
| You know, look, it's obvious. | ||
| I don't hide anything here. | ||
| I obviously think that DeSantis would be the best chief executive to get us out of this. | ||
| And you know, I just saw him this morning at a synagogue in Miami. | ||
| And it's like, the guy speaks, you know, he's not the most entertaining speaker, but he speaks from the heart with no notes and with clarity and knows history and all of those things. | ||
| I was like, that guy, as I'm watching him, that guy should be the president. | ||
| But if at the end of this, Trump is the president and DeSantis is my governor, All right, it would be okay with me, you know what I mean? | ||
| It would be okay. | ||
| But you mentioned the Reagan Library. | ||
| I was there, what was it, 10 days ago or so for that debate. | ||
| It was basically a shit show from top to bottom from the moderators, and I consider Dana a friend. | ||
| I'm sure you know her from your Fox days. | ||
| But just the entire thing felt like it was from 1994 if the Simpsons had done a parody of what a Republican debate would be, right? | ||
| Did you watch it thinking, man, none of this, You give me Megyn Kelly and Ruben and throw in Michael Malice or whoever you want as the moderators, and people might have learned something, including the people on the stage. | ||
| Is that machinery just completely broken and calcified and done? | ||
| It was that night. | ||
| I wouldn't say it's... | ||
| Done as a mechanism. | ||
| I think it could still work, but it didn't that night. | ||
| I mean, there were so many things that were wrong. | ||
| Moderators had no control. | ||
| It's not to say that it's easy, but you should at least try. | ||
| You're not there to serve the presidential candidates. | ||
| You're there to serve the audience. | ||
| You're the traffic cop. | ||
| Do it! | ||
| Do it. | ||
| Sorry, you may not like your job, you may think you might seem a little rude, but that's part of the art of it is sort of trying to thread that needle between being respectful of the audience at home and making sure that the candidates can be heard and not being, you know, too overbearing and acting like, you know, a bully who everybody hates. | ||
| I don't think any of them had ever hosted a presidential debate before, and it showed. | ||
| The woman from Univision was an embarrassment. | ||
| I don't know why Fox agreed to partner with Univision. | ||
| People are online saying, oh, they didn't have any choice, it was the RNC. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| I'm here to tell you that's not how it works. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Fox 100% could have said, we're not going to partner with them. | ||
| Who do you think was paying for that debate? | ||
| You think it was Univision? | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| It was Fox News, which has more money than everybody. | ||
| And so it was Fox News' money, and I'm sure Univision paid some small, paltry amount to sort of partner on it. | ||
| And it would have been up to Fox as the big money maker, payer, to say, we don't want them. | ||
| We want somebody else. | ||
| There's a million plays you could do at the Wall Street Journal, like they did on Debate No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
1. | |
| There's a lot of conservative outlets. | ||
| You could partner with Daily Caller, what have you. | ||
| Probably wouldn't, because it's Tucker. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| They chose them. | ||
| And then they let this woman run wild and she ruined their debate. | ||
| That lunatic ruined their debate. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And by the way, you know, it's like Dana and Stuart, like... | ||
| Better than the Univision lady, but I'll just leave it at that. | ||
| That question about the survivor, it was beneath the dignity of the debate, of the candidates, of the anchors. | ||
| I don't understand how it didn't wind up on the editing room floor. | ||
| And I'll tell you, both of these debates that we've watched so far have made me say the same thing. | ||
| Which is, forgive me because it's a little self-aggrandizing, but I miss Brett, Chris Wallace, and yours truly sitting down together and coming up with the toughest, best, but most on-point debate questions we could. | ||
| And the way we used to do it was we would split it up amongst the three of us. | ||
| We would choose our subjects because we all had our favorites. | ||
| Brett always liked foreign policy. | ||
| I always loved social issues. | ||
| Wallace always liked economic issues. | ||
| So we never really fought over who was going to do what. | ||
| And you sort of have your first choice, and then you divide the second choice. | ||
| Anyway, it always worked out. | ||
| And you go back to your respective dens, and you'd work out the toughest questions you could, and the brain room at Fox would give you all the background information you needed on your favorite issues in your candidates. | ||
| And then you'd meet, and you'd come up with, here's my list. | ||
| Here's where I've gone. | ||
| And the other two would just murder board your questions. | ||
| Not tight enough, too weak, too easy, too ba-ba, too nasty, too not nasty enough. | ||
| And then the debate team, Bill Sam and Chris Dierwalt, those are dirty names now amongst some of the hardcore MAGA crew because they were behind the Arizona call. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Decent, honest journalists. | ||
| Fox never should have gotten rid of them. | ||
| Anyway, they challenge you even more. | ||
| They tighten it up even tougher. | ||
| And so by the time you got out there, you had these gleaming, sharp, beautiful questions that had come from your heart and your brain, but it had been polished by a whole team of people you respected. | ||
| And when I ask my question, or Chris asks his question, or Brett asks his question, the three of us will be beaming with pride, because we all had a hand in it in some way, shape, or form, and we all trusted the others to not back down, and to be strong, and to be a good representative of Fox News and of the audience watching. | ||
| And all I can tell you is, I've been sorely missing that whole thing. | ||
| How many of those did you do? | ||
| Five. | ||
| Yeah, man, give it to Megyn Kelly. | ||
| I'll send a letter to somebody. | ||
| I don't know that anyone's responding to my letters. | ||
| Let me ask you something else that I think, it just popped in my head as you were saying something. | ||
| This is probably more what I would ask you offline, but we're on camera, why not? | ||
| Do you, when you have all these relationships with these people, the politicians and then the other pundits and the talking heads and all of that, do you find at times it can be tough? | ||
| Because I, this is just personally what I've found now, is that because I'm friendly at least with so many of these people and know them and have played basketball with them or had them over for dinner or whatever, Sometimes there's this piece in me where I wanna not criticize someone as much as I should, or I at least have to think about it in a different way, or you don't wanna say something about a certain politician because then they won't do your show. | ||
| How do you balance all of that? | ||
| Because you've been on both sides of this mainstream and now this side. | ||
| You've interviewed everybody. | ||
| You basically know everybody. | ||
| I've never heard anyone say a bad word about you, except maybe some people at NBC. | ||
| So, like, you know, like, How do you balance all of that and still maintain integrity? | ||
| I have very few friends. | ||
| You're on a very short list, my friend. | ||
| You didn't realize how valuable this friendship was to me. | ||
| No, I have a very short list. | ||
| I don't fraternize with them. | ||
| If they're politicians, I don't fraternize with them. | ||
| I'll give you one example. | ||
| I'll give you two examples. | ||
| Vivek Ramaswamy first came into my life as somebody who knew Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School, who's a brilliant professor, and they'd been co-writing pieces for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, or op-eds, on legal issues. | ||
| And I was like, oh, these are good legal issues. | ||
| They were getting at sort of the erosion of free speech. | ||
| And I know Jed a bit. | ||
| He's married to Amy Chua, Tiger Mom. | ||
| Oh, right, right. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| So I knew them a little. | ||
| And so I got to know Vivek, and I started to read his books, and he'd ask me for comment. | ||
| I know him a bit. | ||
| Like him. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| I would fraternize with Vivek. | ||
| Then he decided to run for office. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| It's off. | ||
| We're not friends. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| We're adversarial. | ||
| That's the only way I can do my job. | ||
| Honestly. | ||
| Um, you, it's fine. | ||
| I'm not like your enemy now, but I'm going to hit you. | ||
| I'm going to hit you repeatedly. | ||
| If you do dumb things or things I, I, I think are dumb or worthy of challenge, not to say I'm the ultimate arbiter, but I am of my show. | ||
| And, um, It can't be that friendly anymore. | ||
| It just can't be. | ||
| So you kind of know he's running for office. | ||
| This is not the end of our personal friendship, but it's definitely going to be on pause for a long time. | ||
| And then my second example is, um, Donald Trump. | ||
| When he was a celebrity and you know, on TV, he used to come on Fox. | ||
| He was great. | ||
| He was rated. | ||
| He was fun to talk to. | ||
| He, I, he invited me to a couple of these celebrity apprentice things, which I went to. | ||
| He was always very gregarious. | ||
| You know, when you walk in, he'd give you the big hug and kiss. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was tough not to like Trump. | |
| And then he decided to run for president and he invited me to go down to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| You've got to see it. | ||
| It's so beautiful. | ||
| He sent me all these pictures of it. | ||
| I was like, hell no. | ||
| I am not going to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| The guy is running for president. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| A lot of other journalists did not make the same choice. | ||
| Then he found out that I was going on a girl's trip and we were going to stay at Trump, I don't know, one of his hotels. | ||
| And he tried to pay for it. | ||
| He reached out to say, where are you staying? | ||
| I'll take care of it. | ||
| Oh, very nice, right? | ||
| It's not nice. | ||
| And I said, absolutely not. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Trump. | ||
| We'll pay for our own hotel. | ||
| And I said to Abby, my assistant, make sure you hold on to the records. | ||
| You know, like, this is what politicians try to do. | ||
| And humans try to do it, too. | ||
| It's one thing for Donald Trump's celebrity to try to woo me over to liking him. | ||
| That's less fraught. | ||
| But politician Donald Trump has to receive a hard no. | ||
| In response to all those overtures. | ||
| And Dave, that night I went on to the debate stage, August 6, 2015, and asked him that very hard question. | ||
| There were lots of hard questions, just that one that everybody remembers. | ||
| You know what I had behind my notes? | ||
| In addition to my outline and my fact checks, which are 10 deep and I was ready to back up everything I asked, I had the receipts from that Trump hotel visit and my rejection of his invitation to go to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| Because I didn't want anybody using that against me. | ||
| Same as I'll have to do it to Vivek Ramaswamy if he ever tries to say, you know, like, it's just it gets very complicated when you have to cover them objectively. | ||
| So I think, you know, you either have to choose or you have to just be very open about your bias. | ||
| You know, like, I know you're a DeSantis guy. | ||
| You've been open about that. | ||
| So I think you're OK there. | ||
| But if you have too many of those with politicians, it can get dicey quickly. | ||
| Yeah, and for sure, just from my perspective, the politician version, I don't have that much of it. | ||
| I've played basketball with Ted Cruz, or I've played video games with him, or some of that stuff, but we're not friends like that. | ||
| I think for me, it's more like the pundit class, where I see guys that are kinda doing what we do, and then they kinda go completely off the deep end, and I'm like, ugh, do I have to call you out? | ||
| It's more that, I think, for me. | ||
| Yes, and the answer is yes, you do, you have to. | ||
| No, I do, and like you, I have my short friend list. | ||
| I've got to tell you one other. | ||
| So a couple years back, there's this guy, his name is Carlos Watson. | ||
| He invites me to go on his YouTube show. | ||
| I'd never heard of Carlos Watson. | ||
| I'm like, who is he? | ||
| Abby's like, I don't know, but you're sandwiched in between, it was like LeBron James and Bill Gates. | ||
| So I'm like, who is this guy? | ||
| Like he's got access to some very big names. | ||
| And I don't remember what the forum was on, but it was on a big, it was like election night. | ||
| And so I'm like, okay, I'll do it. | ||
| She's like, he's got all these followers, the show's very successful. | ||
| Okay, so I did it. | ||
| Carlos was a perfect gentleman, very nice guy, solid interviewer, had a good time. | ||
| Then I went on a couple more times. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Eventually I'm like, you know what? | ||
| I launched my show. | ||
| I'm like, I'll have him on. | ||
| Had him on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very nice. | |
| Kind of cagey about like what his background was. | ||
| He didn't want to talk about his life, but that's fine. | ||
| Some people are like that. | ||
| Then he wanted me to go to his Aussie Fest. | ||
| It was like a, you know, like one of those media things like Jordan has, you know, everybody goes, okay. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| Then I see the list of everybody who's going, it's like all these amazing names, people I respect, people I know. | ||
| I'm like, all right, you know, I'll look into it. | ||
| Then the next thing I see, Carlos and Aussie Media are under SEC investigation for impersonating a YouTube CEO, the officer, the chief executive or COO of the company, as Goldman Sachs was trying to figure out whether it was going to give Aussie another business loan and wanted to kick the tires and see if those YouTube numbers were real. | ||
| Well, instead of connecting them with the actual YouTube, his CFO faked being the YouTube executive, lied about their numbers. | ||
| The whole thing came crashing down. | ||
| It was a house of cards that was all made up. | ||
| The YouTube numbers were fake. | ||
| Carlos, pretty soon thereafter, was under arrest. | ||
| The CFO was under arrest. | ||
| OzzyFest was off. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself, Don't become chummy with any of these people. | ||
| And I went out on the air and I'm like, I've got something to tell you, members of my audience. | ||
| This guy who we had on not too long ago and celebrated his independent entrepreneurship, he's a fraud, according to the government and several others. | ||
| Anyway, it's just the whole business is fraught. | ||
| And if you become friends with me, there's a 90% chance you're going to wind up being a fraudster because that's happened to me over and over, Dave Rubin. | ||
| Excuse me, Megyn Kelly, we are friends. | ||
| We have shared tequila many times and I am not a fraud and you are not. | ||
| You actually, I know I can say nice things about you all the time, but when people always ask me, Dave, who do you watch to make any sense of any of this? | ||
| It's like, it's basically you. | ||
| It's you and Jordan for me. | ||
| And I thank you for doing this as always. | ||
| And are you going to come to, why don't you come down to Miami for the next debate? | ||
| We can have tequila and you can yell at the moderators. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Oh, I'd love to reconnect with my old pals from NBC. | ||
| I'll do it if you and I can sit behind them with tomatoes. | ||
| Yes, that can be arranged. | ||
| Bitter! | ||
| Party of one! | ||
| No, two! | ||
| We're more of an orange state. | ||
| We can throw some oranges at them. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| If you're looking for more uncensored opinions from today's thought leaders, check out our media playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
Export Selection