Nov. 9, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
13:24
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Amsterdam can give you maybe a bit of a skewed picture of what is going on. | ||
| We are a very small country and we are extremely densely populated. | ||
| I would say, yes, maybe at first glance it doesn't look as bad as it is maybe in London or in Paris, but it's a matter of time. | ||
| I think we're sitting on a ticking time bomb. | ||
| So Ava, you said something funny to me, or at least seemed funny to me a minute ago, | ||
| which is that you got into this thing a couple of years ago and you didn't realize that you'd | ||
| never be able to get out, which I have heard that sentiment from many people who have even | ||
| sat in that chair in the last two or three days. | ||
| For the people that don't know you, could you very briefly talk about how you got involved in this whole thing, and then we'll talk about the issues of the day. | ||
| Yeah, this whole mess. | ||
| How did I get myself in this position? | ||
| Well, I'm 27, I'm Dutch, so my name is Eva Vlaardingerbroek. | ||
| The last name is always a tough one. | ||
| We're going to spell it properly. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's a tough one even for the Dutch. | ||
| I need to get married, you know, for multiple reasons, but that's definitely one of them. | ||
| It would make my life easier. | ||
| Yeah, I do political commentary, mostly for an international audience right now, because Not exactly liked very much, let's just say, that way in my home country. | ||
| Especially not by the legacy media and the establishment. | ||
| So, yeah, I'm a lawyer. | ||
| I got started almost in a... Yeah, it was almost a coincidence. | ||
| I was in university as a law student and this was during the refugee crisis in Europe, so 2014-15. | ||
| And I was quite critical of the general policies in Europe, Merkel's idea of just opening the borders without any stop or limitation to it, basically. | ||
| And I said, well, guys, maybe this is not a great idea. | ||
| And that got me in trouble with my professors, with my fellow students. | ||
| I spoke to a journalist about it one time at an event, and he's like, would you want to tell your story about the left-wing hegemony at the university and how you feel like academic freedom isn't really a thing anymore? | ||
| Yeah, I'll do that. | ||
| I'll do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's exactly what happened. | ||
| And then I came to realize very quickly that most of the doors that I thought were open to me as a young law student had closed and that there was really no way No way back and only one way that was forward. | ||
| So I continued to speak out and I did so first on a national level. | ||
| I had a brief story in Dutch politics, which was a straight-up disaster. | ||
| And then I figured, no, I'm gonna go independent and take it to a higher level and do my commentary in English. | ||
| So that's kind of how that happened. | ||
| So for people that don't know that much about Holland and I just mentioned to you I've been there many times, I have family there, I really love the culture and in some ways at least Amsterdam to me seems like a place where some coexistence has worked better maybe than a little bit of What I'm seeing here in London or Paris, for example, I'm not totally sure you're agreeing with me. | ||
| And that's just that's just fine. | ||
| If not, that's what I can tell you as a tourist. | ||
| But feel free to offer the counter. | ||
| But the reason I bring it up is because I don't think most people have a sense of what's going on in Holland. | ||
| They think about Amsterdam and they think about coffee shops. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| What would you want people to know about sort of the makeup of Holland and I guess maybe the geography and where it sort of sits within what's going on across Europe right now? | ||
| Sure, well, I mean, you're not wrong if you go to Amsterdam. | ||
| It seems, especially if you're in the city center, that... | ||
| Or you were, no. | ||
| You're kidding. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, it's quite a segregated city. | |
| So, you know, it's ruled by the left and a lot of champagne socialists. | ||
| So the housing prices are extremely high and so nobody really can afford to live in the city center. | ||
| And that pushes, you know, usually the immigrants out. | ||
| And so we have, just like in French cities and stuff, we have suburbs that are highly highly uh dominated by by migrant groups especially from non-western countries because well just like everywhere in europe you know most of the immigrants that we get are from the middle east or from africa north africa but also sub-saharan africa a lot of muslim immigrants come to come to europe so you know it's obviously a difference between our immigration influx in that sense and um and about the immigrants that you guys have coming in through the southern border | ||
| So Amsterdam can give you maybe a bit of a skewed picture of what is going on. | ||
| We are a very small country and we are extremely densely populated. | ||
| I would say, yes, maybe at first glance it doesn't look as bad as it is maybe in London or in Paris, but it's a matter of time. | ||
| I think we're sitting on a ticking time bomb. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we have open borders, obviously within the European Union, so people can Travel freely which people really like because you don't have to show your passport the border going from the Netherlands to to Belgium But that also means that everybody who comes in anywhere within the EU can travel freely So it in a way, you know, we already don't have national sovereignty anymore So I remember the first time I was there I think was in 1997 and I took a train from Amsterdam to Rome and I think you basically have to go to four or five countries Belgium Luxembourg | |
| Maybe something else on the way to Italy. | ||
| I mean you're basically within 20 hours in four different countries and I suppose at any point you could hop off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Live whatever life you want to live. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| Which is a bizarre notion. | ||
| And it happens, right? | ||
| So a lot of the migrants that come in through, for example, through Italy, they go to Lampedusa first. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the footage recently. | ||
| You know, it's being swarmed. | ||
| But usually people don't stay there. | ||
| Same thing with Eastern Europe. | ||
| They don't stay there because the social benefits are better in northwestern European countries. | ||
| So they all come to Germany, to the Netherlands, to Sweden, Norway, you know, because we're Yeah, the nice liberal places, you know, that offer the softest landing, so to say. | ||
| So what is going on with the politics of Poland? | ||
| You know, obviously, we covered it a little bit, but probably should have done much more. | ||
| And I should have you on again to discuss what's going on with the farmers there, but also COVID stuff. | ||
| It seems like it's like a big mix of things. | ||
| And also, you guys are not foreign into political violence. | ||
| I mean, Theo van Gogh was murdered on the street in Amsterdam 25 years ago, and they pinned a note on his body, you know, that they were going to come after Andra Ziali next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You know, put her on the map in a sort of unfortunate way. | ||
|
unidentified
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But yeah, what's like a general state of the political? | |
| Yeah, actually, it's good that you bring that up because I feel like a lot of the topics that we talk about with immigration and with the climate activism and all of that, we're talking about it now and how bad things are now. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| This was in 2001. | ||
| In 2002, we had two big political murders in the Netherlands. | ||
| One was Theo van Gogh. | ||
| He was stabbed in broad daylight by an Islamist. | ||
| And the year after that, we had Pim Fortuyn, a conservative politician who would have otherwise, if he hadn't been murdered, would have become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. | ||
| And he was a very flamboyant, but strong intellectual conservative. | ||
| And he got shot by a climate activist. | ||
| I can't even remember this one. | ||
| That's so bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, 2001, 2002, right? | ||
| So it's not as if the problems that we're dealing with now are, you know, recent. | ||
| It's been going on for 20 years and nothing has changed since and things have just basically gotten worse. | ||
| We've been ruled for 30 years now by one specific party, the VVD, always in a coalition format because we don't have a two-party system, we have tons of parties. | ||
| But yeah, by the same neoliberal, you know, just the only thing that they care about is free market and open borders. | ||
| Free market, you know, goes hand in hand oftentimes. | ||
| And they've ruled with the left and the policies have just been, well, in terms of immigration detrimental, but agriculture is now under heavy attack. | ||
| Yeah, can you talk about what's going on there for a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, sure, yeah. | ||
| I've been very involved in the fight for the Dutch farmers, kind of accidentally as well, and how that happened. | ||
| But our... | ||
| These things are all connected, that's how it happened. | ||
| Yes. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. So the Dutch farmers, we have a lot of agriculture in the Netherlands. | ||
| We're a small country, but more than 50 percent of the land is owned by farmers. | ||
| We're the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, | ||
| right after the US, which is quite, you know, a large position to have as such a tiny country. | ||
| And we're super good at it. | ||
| You know, you have family in the Netherlands and you probably know that this | ||
| is something that's in our blood, you know, it's a century old. | ||
| I've seen all the tulip fields. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so we're really good at that. | ||
| And now suddenly our government has decided that we have a nitrogen crisis and that more than 30% of all of the farms need to go because it's bad for the climate. | ||
| And it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Now, technically, they don't even say it's bad for the climate. | ||
| They say it's bad for the state of the Dutch nature, which is funny, you know, because everybody's been to the... | ||
| Right, and it's weird also to think that the people who own that land, you know, would want to see it polluted or see it go bad, you know. | ||
| They obviously need it to be fertile and good soil, otherwise they wouldn't be in business. | ||
| So it's the whole notion is just... | ||
| I think it's all predicated on a lie and that in essence it's just a way for the Dutch government to take land away from citizens which they desperately need and they've admitted to that for new houses because we have an ever-growing population as a result of mass migration and they don't know where to leave those people. | ||
| Is there any political will, I mean bringing it back to migration since that's sort of been the theme here a lot of it, I mean is there any political will now to reverse some of this stuff? | ||
| Well, when it's about migration, people talk about it a lot, but I feel like, you know, everywhere in the Western world, in that sense, we're at an impasse. | ||
| Because we still have our borders wide open, and then people are talking about, well, we need to start re-migration, you know, we need to start sending people back home. | ||
| But we're all part of all of these universal declarations of human rights and then you have a whole apparatus of lawyers You know that say well you can't do that because you're part of this this treaty and that treaty and it would be It would be a violation of their of their human rights to go and think about re-migration. | ||
| So we're just stuck you know nothing ever really happens and I feel like we well you first need to close the doors, you know close the gates because I We have a saying that translates weirdly to English, but a Dutch saying that goes something along the lines of, well, you can mop the floor, but if the tap is still open, it's not really going to do that much. | ||
| And I feel like that's what's happening with immigration. | ||
| You can start talking about re-migration, but if everybody's still coming in through the back door, then... | ||
|
unidentified
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This is sort of how I've ended a lot of these interviews. | |
| Are you hopeful, not only for your country, but the West as a whole? | ||
| Do you sense that maybe the events of the last couple of weeks have kind of broken some people out of their slumber? | ||
| That seems to be a bit of a theme here. | ||
| Not a solution, but at least an initial salvo. | ||
| Right, yeah, well, I hope so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I feel like it's hard to deny reality, you know, when you see here a hundred thousand people out on the street who are very clearly not just there, you know, to support maybe Palestine, just Palestine, but that there's this sort of cultural and even ethnic component to the stance that they're taking and it becomes so visible. | ||
| I hope that even the sleeping masses are like, oh, okay, wait a second. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, In a way, too little too late, right? | ||
| The enemy isn't at the gate, you know, they're in. | ||
| They're in the bedroom. | ||
| They're in, yeah, so it's... Am I hopeful? | ||
| Well, my answer to that is always yes, because you have to be, otherwise, you know, we're just gonna sit back and do nothing. | ||
| I'm also being realistic though, the numbers don't look good. | ||
| You know, the numbers really don't look good and unless there is some sort of Intense, you know public revolt, I guess and then obviously in peaceful ways Against the political establishment. | ||
| I don't think that anything is going to change. | ||
| So people really do need to Yeah, start voting for at least for the right parties the ones that they that they've you know smeared as as far right for the longest time and I think now it's It's a question of whether or not you want a future not about am I afraid to be maybe called far-right or a Nazi or a racist or whatnot. | ||
| It's like no, those terms shouldn't hold any, you know, value anymore coming from the people on the left who've allowed all of this to happen, so. | ||
| Let's fight. | ||
| Let's fight! | ||
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