Nov. 7, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
20:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| You're going to have to consider things that you've never considered because what we're doing is we're normalizing the precursors of genocide. | ||
| These are the precursors of genocide, make no mistake. | ||
| your friendly college students with blue hair chanting from the river to the sea | ||
| are talking about the deaths of millions of people. | ||
| Eric, you get no introduction because you've been on the Rubin Report 1,700 times. | ||
| We just checked the records. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's an awful lot, but it's been... Yeah, what did I do? | |
| It's been 84 years. | ||
| No, it's been a long time. | ||
| We had to come to London to do this together. | ||
| We've got 25 minutes. | ||
| We had dinner last night. | ||
| You're, I would say, on it when it comes to the state of the world right now, and your concerns are the things that I think everyone is concerned about right now. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Don't know what to do exactly. | ||
| You know, one of the things that came out of the discussion last night is that I don't think we are where we think we are. | ||
| I give the analogy that if you have a river that has always been flowing and one year you have unseasonably cold temperatures and it freezes over, people think they can do what they've always done. | ||
| They can dive off the rock into the river and they're going to hit ice one year and they realize that you have to change your behavior when there's a phase change. | ||
| I think that many of the recourses that we've thought about, free markets, free speech, democracy, have to be rethought if they become gamed. | ||
| And I think one of the things that we're experiencing is we don't know whether to roll back to a previous version of ourselves, which would be like trying to find safe mode on a computer where the operating system has become corrupted. | ||
| Or whether we need to go forward for things that aren't capitalism or communism, aren't democracy, because in fact there's been a phase change in our world. | ||
| And I think what we're doing is avoiding the question of, you know, for example, if Hamas is a democratically elected government and it engages in pure terror, Is democracy what we think it is? | ||
| Does free speech operate the same way if you have armies of bots that can confuse | ||
| people into thinking that, uh, there's a mass of people who believe something | ||
| which there isn't on day one, but by virtue of the power of persuasion and | ||
| social coercion, um, people are afraid to hold simple, decent perspectives | ||
| because every time they do it, they're torn apart by what seems to be 10,000. | ||
| Uh, accounts telling them that they're an idiot, that they're cringe worthy, | ||
| that they're over that they're bare barbarous. | ||
| And I, you know, I watched this happen to you. | ||
| You, one of the, you've seen my Twitter account, my dad. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, right? | ||
| And I saw the rep, the, the repetition through what psychologists would call | ||
| perseveration, where, um, you know, they would just hit you with the | ||
| same phrases over and over again. | ||
| And it causes people to move away from you because we have evolutionary programming. | ||
| So I think one of the things that I believe is that, um, you know, if I think about the early work you and I did together, we were talking about fake news and what was coming. | ||
| It was pretty prophetic though. | ||
| That, that stuff held up pretty well. | ||
| You're on the short list of people that I would say that interviews actually do stand up and were ballpark. | ||
| Right back at you. | ||
| Or let's say directionally right about where this was going to go. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Unfortunately, we're sort of in the prequel version of Star Wars now when Yoda says, ugh, failed we have. | ||
| That seems like in some respect... Well, and somebody tried to execute Order 66 and so the Jedi, you know, were put under a lot of pressure. | ||
| But one of the things that I really appreciate is uh the number of people who've had their relationships strained by the relentless attack we've all been under uh you know you used to be a liberal and a lefty i'm still in that position um and the fact is is that we're still talking we're still here man well and a large number of us uh never stopped talking to each other somebody some people have stopped talking to us but one of the things that i think is really impressive is the extent to which we have held together | ||
| And even if I disagree with some of the positions you've now adopted, whatever, the same rules go. | ||
| So what I was going to say is, if we want to do the same thing we were doing all those years ago, we have to figure out what are the edgy things nobody's prepared to think that unfortunately are going to be prophetic. | ||
| And I think one of them is going to be That you can't simply keep invoking democracy, the free movement of people, diversity is our strength, etc, etc, because it's going into a place that's going to be anything but tolerant. | ||
| We're going to have to learn, for example, that we must be intolerant of intolerance to be tolerant. | ||
| It's like multiplying negative one times negative one to get a positive number, and I think People are afraid that they're going to have to turn against things that have always been true, but like that winter where suddenly things are colder than usual, the river stops flowing the way it always has, and you have to watch it. | ||
| So in the interest of time, and we'll pick this up back when we're in the show, anytime you can come to the Free State of Florida. | ||
| So at dinner last night, we had a great table of people from James Lindsay and Douglas Murray and Melissa Chen and all the usual suspects. | ||
| And Coleman Hughes. | ||
| This was the whole crew of people trying to work through all this. | ||
| What we were whittling it down to last night is exactly what you just talked about there. | ||
| The paradox of tolerance and what Western societies are going to have to do in the face of now What I guess you would call political or cultural movements that are using our freedoms against us. | ||
| So in relation to what we saw here just a day or two before you and I arrived in London, this 200,000 person size protest with Al-Qaeda flags, Hamas flags, a river to the sea chants and everything else. | ||
| What does a Western society do related to speech? | ||
| Understanding that Western Europe has different laws related to speech than we do. | ||
| You're going to have to consider things that you've never considered because what we're doing is we're normalizing the precursors of genocide. | ||
| These are the precursors of genocide, make no mistake. | ||
| Your friendly college students with blue hair chanting from the river to the sea are talking about the deaths of millions of people. | ||
| And what's more, The people chanting this are going to get exactly what they oppose. | ||
| They're going to get farther and farther. | ||
| They are electing the right-wing government in Israel that I don't want. | ||
| You may support them, but I don't want that right-wing government in Israel. | ||
| They want to pull their children from the rubble because the videos are that powerful. | ||
| By normalizing the concept of martyrdom, What you're seeing is what I've called IDF assisted suicide. | ||
| Which is how do we get the IDF to attack our cities our population centers? | ||
| You know if we can just for example put our military installations proximate to a hospital or a school We can put the IDF in what I've said is zoogzwang Which is a term borrowed from chess for when every move your opponent gives you leaves you worse off and if Israel does not extricate itself from the dance of death with a non-traditional foe It's going to find that its soul will be destroyed. | ||
| And I want to be very clear about this. | ||
| We're used to the idea of nations warring over things like mineral rights and shipping lanes and territory. | ||
| This is not that. | ||
| This is a non-traditional foe, which is saying, we are going to fight you in ways that you don't want. | ||
| We want you to hurt us as badly as possible because we're after your soul as well as the land. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| And we're going to do everything imaginable and unimaginable to you in the process. | ||
| Sure. | ||
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unidentified
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Right? | |
| So we're going to, there will be no rules in terms of what we will do to you. | ||
| And we will also rip up the rules and how you can possibly respond. | ||
| We will cause your children to come home from college. | ||
| supportive of barbarism and atrocities beyond the pale, and it's time to release more video on mainstream channels to show what people are supporting. | ||
| How many people have the guts to watch a resistance fighter take a shovel and attempt to sever the head of a corpse? | ||
| What is it like to shoot into a port-a-potty? | ||
| Or at least Please show me the brave resistance fighter shooting directly at the tire of an ambulance. | ||
| I mean, nobody's getting killed. | ||
| There's nothing graphic about it, but you know what it is. | ||
| It's like trying to say, we want to make sure that you can't get your injured to a place where they can be healed. | ||
| What we're talking about is, and mark my words, you're talking about a non-traditional foe, and all of your intuition is how to fight a traditional foe. | ||
| And it's time to recognize that Western society has been gamed, and if you do not de-corrupt and de-game what has happened, and you keep saying we want democracy, we want freedom of movement, etc., etc., diversity is our strength, you're talking about killing. | ||
| Many people, and by the way, this starts with the Jews and it's not ending there. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that's one of the lines that I think from October 9th, the first Monday after this, that I immediately said, I think this is about the Jews. | ||
| You think when they're done with the Jews there, they're going to go like this. | ||
| But also, boy, I want to get this back to the free speech part because without getting too lost in the geopolitics and the nature of the fight, so we're here in London. | ||
| There are quite literally hundreds of thousands, if not more, people in this country that seemingly support this. | ||
| How do you, as a Western nation, defend free speech and defend the right to protest and all that stuff without self-immolating? | ||
| Which seems like it might be happening. | ||
| Maybe you're misunderstanding. | ||
| That's what the people who are the hardest line from that side have figured out. | ||
| They have figured out You are going to be slow to realize that free speech will kill you. | ||
| Well, this was the nature of our conversation last night when it got pretty hot. | ||
| Because it's the most difficult conversation. | ||
| And look, if you and I have any basis to our relationship is that we get there early before anybody's willing to talk about these things. | ||
| Like, we would have come across as conspiracy theorists before the Twitter files came out, before we knew that the GEC or CISA Insider Department of Homeland Security was actually coordinating social media, what could and couldn't be said. | ||
| What we are going to have to realize is that our most sacred tenets have been weaponized against us. | ||
| And if we do not put the brainpower into de-weaponizing and realizing that we are in what I've called the no-name revolution, right? | ||
| Years ago, 2017, I was saying that on stage at the Maasai. | ||
| This thing is going to spread worldwide. | ||
| The chain of transmission from the Gaza Strip to Iran, to distracting the U.S. | ||
| with its, what, 11 active carrier groups, and then China says, how many of those groups have to be engaged in regional skirmishes before the Taiwan Strait becomes more interesting? | ||
| I think what we're not understanding is the post-World War II era defined a bubble that will never exist again in human history, and that we've spent our entire lives in an anomalous period thinking that it's normal. | ||
| So when a lot of people now see our kind of geriatric and 80 plus year old leaders, that basically gets to the thesis of your point, right? | ||
| Like we've had a set of leaders, and I don't mean it purely on the age level, Sure. | ||
| intellectual class has been running around defending something that in some ways didn't | ||
| exist anymore, whether it was economically or related to free speech or anything else. | ||
| Sure. So we just lost Dianne Feinstein, but the fact is that our leaders now are basically have | ||
| been born in the 40s, maybe the late, late 30s. | ||
| And a lot of these people, they spent their entire life in the shadow of the generation that knew the horrors of the early 20th century. | ||
| And they're not the adults, they're peacetime adults for a peacetime that was only possible because of the anomalous nature of World War II and the intellectual power of atomic weaponry, which caused everyone to realize how serious life was. | ||
| I can tell you that because I've been talking about the need to explode a rare nuclear device above ground because people have forgotten their fear, they thought that the Cold War consigned nuclear weapons to be an archaic concern. | ||
| Nobody is thinking that anymore, right? | ||
| Things need to be so concrete for people to shake them out of their super that it's almost beyond belief. | ||
| So is that the bizarre, and I hate to use the term, but it's come up a couple times the last couple days, is that the bizarre silver lining to this moment? | ||
| That the barbarity and the livestream nature of this? | ||
| We haven't seen it. | ||
| Everything? | ||
| No, well, we've seen it to a degree. | ||
| We have certainly not seen it all. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| We haven't seen it, Dave. | ||
| How do you mean? | ||
| I've seen things and you have seen things on telegram channels where you have to work really hard because the Google search engine seems to hide things from us. | ||
| There is some desire to normalize things. | ||
| There's concepts like strategic silence where you don't report the news as a news organization because you're worried about what the social effect of it is. | ||
| Remember when we did the four types of fake news on the show years ago? | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| You said one of the type, the most nefarious type, I quoted you in my book was the stuff that they won't cover. | ||
| The stuff that they cover and lie about we have a little something to work with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But when somebody says, you know, the mass killer shouted a religious slogan in a foreign language no motive is known. | ||
| It's time to end this once and for all. | ||
| And what we're doing is we're playing with ultimate fire. | ||
| We have to worry About Russia, who in some sense we may have wronged, but they are still butchers and very, very dangerous. | ||
| China has been playing the long game. | ||
| I have the ultimate respect for how disciplined they've been, but we have to realize what they really present. | ||
| India, Pakistan remains incredibly potent. | ||
| Iran and Israel are poised for something and people have to realize you've never seen a hydrogen bomb used in anger. | ||
| Um, the first time it happens will be like nine 11, uh, raised to the | ||
| thousandth power. | ||
| Um, this was an anomaly and we, we squandered the last bit of this. | ||
| We were supposed to use the post-World War II peace to figure out how to stabilize this place. | ||
| And we failed. | ||
| We talked about peace dividends, we worried more about getting swimming pools and luxury automobiles. | ||
| Is that just the nature of human reality? | ||
| You go through these hard times, you build good things, the good people become weak, You know, there's this fourth turning thing, and the problem is I have a different version of it, which is hard times make strong men. | ||
| Strong men make nuclear weapons in good times. | ||
| Good times make weak men. | ||
| Weak men and nuclear weapons make end times. | ||
| And people have to stop this fourth turning nonsense. | ||
| Okay, so just on the, again, we'll do this. | ||
| From Talk Who's Fast? | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| You'll come to Miami, we'll do a proper one, or we'll do it on Skype in the meantime, but I just want to, I'm really trying to nail down. | ||
| No, in person. | ||
| I'm trying to nail down the speech component of this. | ||
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unidentified
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Tell me. | |
| So when you tell me that, okay, so the river to the sea is a genocidal chant. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| In Florida, DeSantis has passed laws, you know, we ban some of these protests because he's talking about material support. | ||
| And he makes us uncomfortable by banning speech. | ||
| Well, it's material support, but yes, people are arguing that it's his banning speech. | ||
| My point is that he's recognized the phase transition. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how do we encourage that while being respectful of the ideas and ideals that we care about? | ||
| How do we make sure that we have the proper tools, which is what he's done, to export to the rest of the country and maybe the world? | ||
| It has to do with the fact that you need an interpretation of the world that allows you not to have a suicide pact. | ||
| Democracy is not a suicide pact. | ||
| Free speech is not a suicide pact. | ||
| Tolerance is not a suicide pact. | ||
| Immigration is not a suicide pact. | ||
| When you start to realize that someone has gained your culture, there are times when you have to uninvite a dinner guest. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is we're being given a choice. | ||
| And the choice is, do you wish to have a naive relationship to your ideas and The gamers. | ||
| uh... coming from outside and weaponize these things against you or do you actually realize that you're being called upon to say what is the soul and intent of free speech the soul and intent of democracy and so you're being given a choice between the letter and the intent for example if you take the first amendment of the constitution it says congress may make no law uh... respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof somebody says well jihad is part of my religion i am entitled by the first amendment to practice it and i will do it with your children No, you won't. | ||
| And the reason is that we have a Supreme Court that acts as the oral Torah to the written Torah that is the Constitution. | ||
| And so the Supreme Court is going to be active, and it's going to have to figure out how to get the letter of the decision law, the case law, to match the spirit and intent of the Constitution. | ||
| It's going to be incredibly unpleasant. | ||
| but it's a matter of survival. And the Constitution will mean nothing if we don't survive. And we have | ||
| to realize that we are now facing existential threats because of the incredible simplicity. | ||
| If we have committed one crime during this period, it is we have pushed out the idea | ||
| that you can understand freedom through simplicities. | ||
| I believe in free speech. | ||
| I believe in open borders. | ||
| I believe in democracy. | ||
| I believe in one man, one vote. | ||
| Oh really? | ||
| Does Wyoming, which has two senators and no people, have the same power in the Senate as California, which has a tremendous number of people and two senators? | ||
| No, there's no one man, one vote. | ||
| People are going to have to wake up to the idea that they've been fed. | ||
| Child-like aphorisms that do not actually work for the very difficult times We're in and what I would say is let's not wait to become those strong people Let's not be weak people. | ||
| Let's realize that we do suspend certain kinds of Liberty You're not exactly free to use free speech if you're privy to something about the invasion of beaches of Normandy To just go on social media and say hey, we huge troop buildup if that were happening today We would have to restrict so the idea is We need to let people in on how a mature society actually handled these things over time. | ||
| It is the easiest way for people that are maybe not clear about all this to see how for years guys like us were going to college campuses and being called Nazis and had to have security. | ||
| been protested and microaggressions and all the rest of it and then the second this thing happens | ||
| with Israel suddenly universities are defending the call to genocide. To me that's like a very | ||
| good example of how we can show people boy this was only about controlling it. Nothing... | ||
| Well look but you know there were also issues where people are confused because Israel has | ||
| chosen to do things that are really not comfortable and maybe not right you know. | ||
| No nation has ever only behaved ethically. | ||
| I know that any nation has behaved more ethically, but I get your meta point. | ||
| So my point is that there's two basic ways to do this. | ||
| There's the conservative way, which is you say something simple like, No nation has behaved more ethically given the difficult situation that Israel has always been in at an existential level. | ||
| So that makes good sense to me. | ||
| Then there's the liberal way of doing it, which is that you have a paragraph that goes on for, you know, 12 pages with lots of footnotes and pointers and references and hyperlinks. | ||
| It's a slow delay of the bed. | ||
| You have to read a lot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, now I'm not saying this and I'm not saying that. | ||
| So I'm in the camp that does that thing. | ||
| And then the conservatives basically say, we don't have time for this. | ||
| Here's the simple thing. | ||
| It's not quite true, but it's true enough. | ||
| It's like, it's not true that there are only two genders, but it's true enough. | ||
| And so, you know, we're divided. | ||
| I was going to talk about, no, there's persistent Mullerian duct syndrome, and you have to understand about developmental identities. | ||
| That divide, we've got to bridge it. | ||
| Even with five hour podcasts, it starts getting... I understand. | ||
| Well, you know, I look to my Muslim brothers and cousins. | ||
| They just say P-B-U-H. | ||
| They don't say, you know, in the name of Allah, the most compassionate and merciful, and Muhammad is the only peace be upon him. | ||
| They P-B-U-H, right? | ||
| Like, let's get to the chase. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| I think we have to stop. | ||
| But we just started. | ||
| This is very bizarre. | ||
| See you in Florida. | ||
| There's a lot of people here. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
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unidentified
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And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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