Nov. 10, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
12:54
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| One of the things that we also have to acknowledge is that while, yes, some of the people are recent newcomers who came illegally through the open border we have on the south coast where we allow small boats to come in, a lot of, particularly the most extreme Islamists in this country haven't come in recent years. | ||
| They're people who are second and third generation immigrants. | ||
| Often well-educated, often well-integrated, they have jobs and they participate in society, they speak good English, etc. | ||
| So it's not just that we have let the wrong people in, it's also that we have done a terrible job of assimilation and | ||
| integration. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, Constantine, we are in your country. | |
| And I was going to dinner last night and I went by a moss rally. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Was it a Hamas rally or was it a pro-Palestine rally? | ||
|
unidentified
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I make no distinction because I don't think they're making a distinction. | |
| I don't think anyone out there is making a distinction. | ||
| I don't think anyone out there is chanting slogans against Hamas and that was clearly what ignited it. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I think we have to distinguish. | ||
| I think what really troubled me was what we saw in the first couple of days, which is Israel hadn't done anything, hadn't responded. | ||
| And people were out there in jubilant and celebratory, that to me is clearly support for terrorism. | ||
| There are lots of people in this country who just, you know, you know all this, they've been brainwashed into oppressor, oppressed, they think the Palestinians are oppressed, therefore they are, you know, it's the AOC, you know, I remember when she first got elected and she was asked about Israel, it was clear she knew nothing about it. | ||
| But she did say I'm always on the side of the oppressed. | ||
| And so I think there are a lot of people in this country who are not pro-Hamas at all, but they are reflexively pro-Palestine because they keep being told that there's, you know, Palestinians are oppressed, etc, etc. | ||
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unidentified
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So intellectually I understand that, but having driven past a few of them, I don't think there's any reason to think that there's anyone there who doesn't support Hamas. | |
| I mean, no one there would say I didn't see anyone there with a sign saying I'm for the Palestinians or the Gazans and I'm against Hamas. | ||
| That would not go particularly well for them. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that the... You know what I mean? | ||
| I understand what you're saying sort of on paper, but I think in function, there's no one there saying, oh, we're against Hamas. | ||
| That doesn't necessarily mean they are for Hamas. | ||
| I think we do have to make that distinction. | ||
| I don't think millions of people in this country support Hamas. | ||
| But back to your question, I'm not happy that there are thousands and thousands... I said this in my speech yesterday. | ||
| I've been in a dark place these last few weeks to find out, irrespective of Jews or not or whoever, just that there are thousands of people in this country who think Massacring civilians is something to be celebrated. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's the trouble. | ||
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unidentified
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So what do you think, well, since we're here in London, I mean, what do you think that the British people have to do about this? | |
| It does not strike me that England has a way out of this. | ||
| In a weird sense. | ||
| Well, there is a way out of it, but I don't know that there is a way out of it that they are willing to consider. | ||
| Yeah, I think, well ultimately it's going to mean electing people who are going to do something about these issues. | ||
| Whether that's likely to happen is a whole different conversation. | ||
| I'm not particularly optimistic about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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What would be something? | |
| The example I would give you is in the first few days after those rallies that I talked about, the pro-Hamas rallies, the pro-terrorism rallies, there was polling done of Labour and Conservative voters in this country. | ||
| 92% of Conservative voters and 70% of Labour voters, which is higher than I actually thought, support deporting people who glorify terrorism. | ||
| And in this country we have different rules around free speech, as you know. | ||
| So, glorification of terrorism is illegal, publicly expressing support for Hamas is illegal, etc. | ||
| The majority of the country basically agrees that these people, if they're foreign nationals, shouldn't be here. | ||
| There is nobody, including the current Conservative government, who is going to get rid of them. | ||
| So, where that leaves us, I think, is quite a dangerous place, actually, because the people who will come along and say, we're going to do this, are going to be very, very extreme. | ||
| I would much rather the mainstream take care of this problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you think this could have been dealt with maybe eight years ago, say pre-Brexit, you know, when there was this massive wave of immigration? | |
| Had it been at least nipped at that point, perhaps it would not be as dire as it seems now? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think one of the things that we also have to acknowledge is that while, yes, some of the people, recent newcomers who came illegally through the open border we have on the south coast where we allow small boats, to come in. | ||
| A lot of, particularly the most extreme Islamists in this country haven't come in recent years. | ||
| They're people who are second and third generation immigrants, often well-educated, often well-integrated. | ||
| They have jobs and they participate in society. | ||
| They speak good English, etc. | ||
| So it's not just that we have let the wrong people in, it's also that we have done a terrible job of assimilation and integration. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're British. | |
| You're also Jewish. | ||
| So... Jewish. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jewish? | |
| Trust me, however Jewish you are, it's enough for them. | ||
| Oh, the anti-Semites are the ones that always determine who's Jewish. | ||
| This is how, when people say to me, are you Jewish? | ||
| I'm like, well, look, I'm a quarter Jewish ethnically down the father's side. | ||
| I don't think I've ever been in a synagogue. | ||
| I'm not practicing. | ||
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unidentified
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But if Hamas... I hate to tell you, a moot point. | |
| If Hamas hijack an airplane, I'm going to be on the list. | ||
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unidentified
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You're on the list. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, That was also when, right when I got here, there was that first, or I guess I don't know if it was the first, but there was this sort of massive 100,000 person rally, they said. | ||
| And I was thinking, man, if I was a Jew that lived in London, you'd have to be going, where's my passport? | ||
| And what are the options? | ||
| I'm not going to lie. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, do you think that's what the average Jew is feeling? | ||
| Again, it's not just the Jews, but it starts with the Jews. | ||
| We have this, in Russia, where I was born and where I come from originally, we have lots of Jewish jokes made by Russian Jews to reflect the tragedy of Jews' lives in Eastern Europe. | ||
| It's very dark. | ||
| Yes, and so the joke is a bunch of Jews are sitting around discussing something and another Jew comes along and he says, look guys, I don't know what you're talking about, but I agree, it's the right time to leave. | ||
| And yeah, I speak to a lot of Jewish people, particularly sort of people who are openly Jewish, people who may wear the kippah, people who may be recognizably Jewish in the street, who are all considering. | ||
| And I'll be honest with you, I mean, when I saw those scenes, I have to say that I am very naturally optimistic as a human being. | ||
| When I see this moment, I am not optimistic about the future, and the reason is I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy. | ||
| I talk to a lot of people who are much smarter than me, and I ask them all the same question. | ||
| How is this going to get fixed? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And none of them have an answer because the truth is we are allowing more people to come in who have this worldview and we're not getting rid of the people who are already here who we could get rid of and we're not doing a good job of assimilating and integrating people whereby they buy into what it means to be British. | ||
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unidentified
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Is that British people not doing a good job or is that they've made their choice and they don't want to integrate in that way? | |
| I mean in America we have Millions of Muslim people, they have integrated. | ||
| Dearborn, Michigan is a particular problem, but the integration problem, it's a two-way street, right? | ||
| Well, of course it's a two-way street, but it is a consequence of the way that the host country acts. | ||
| And there are countries like Sweden and Denmark who are taking very drastic action now when it comes to breaking up ghettos and taking all sorts of other actions that, in my opinion, European countries are going to have to do unless we want Tens of thousands to become hundreds of thousands. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| What do you do in a situation where you have the polling the way you describe it, and yet political leaders who seem to do nothing? | ||
| I mean, it seems like your Prime Minister's made some good statements, but it's like, no one thinks he's going to honestly do anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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What do you do about that? | |
| Like, you have to magically have to use alchemy to come up with a better policy? | ||
| Well, this is why I'm not optimistic, because I don't see what the answer is. | ||
| I don't see the Conservative Party And it's because they care more about Guardian headlines than they do about doing what the people want them to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when that stops, I have no idea. | ||
|
unidentified
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As a creature of the internet, what do you make of the social media war related to all of this? | |
| You know, there's obviously the TikTok portion, which has been completely overtaken by the pro, quote unquote, Palestine people. | ||
| But I'm noticing on Twitter, I have never Well, it's not even that I'm getting more hate than ever, which I'm pretty accustomed to getting hate, but the level of bots the second I tweet something is completely out of control. | ||
| Oh really? | ||
| I haven't noticed. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh man, the second I tweet anything, a gajillion people who don't follow me with the same Hitler, and whatever, it's on my phone. | |
| But what do you make of the social media war, and also how it's sort of affected young people? | ||
| Yeah, what I see on Twitter and I said this when Elon first took over, I was very happy and I remain very happy and optimistic for Twitter because I think that he's opened the Overton window and that needed doing and the consequence of that would be that there would be more hateful rhetoric, there would be more anti-Semites, there would be more racists and I'm perfectly happy with that actually. | ||
| I don't have a problem blocking people etc. | ||
| The thing that troubles me much more about what's happening on social media is that, and Elon is doing something about it with community notes and disincentivizing people from posting fake content, but I quote tweeted a guy who since deleted the tweet only a few days ago, who shared a video of American soldiers landing in Israel to go and fight. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, I saw that one and it turned out to be completely fake. | |
| What was it? | ||
| It was from... Well, it was from 2002 in Romania. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it was so obvious because even the military unit they claimed it was, it was clearly not them, etc. | ||
| But this is an account with 1.5 million followers. | ||
| That video had been seen by tens and probably millions of people. | ||
| We have to find a way, particularly with the coming of AI, to be able to differentiate between what's true and what's not. | ||
| At least when it comes to, like, videos. | ||
|
unidentified
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In some ways, does that seem what the bigger problem is here now? | |
| Not to diminish anything that's happened there or what's happening here, but that we're entering this uncanny valley with AI now where we are so damn close to having no idea whatever will be real, including guys that kind of are We could get to a point very soon where somebody could take this and have us saying whatever they wanted. | ||
| In any language. | ||
| And we might not even be able to see that or whatever. | ||
| So that's a big, big problem in terms of how we talk about what's happening around the world. | ||
| But on Israel-Palestine, I think we've seen exactly what we've seen on every other issue, is people are so dumb that they will automatically just follow the tribe that they happen to be associated with politically and not look at any of the newest of what's going on. | ||
| And the people whose platforms get bigger and bigger, the people who have the lowest resolution take on all these issues. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, let me ask you one other thing, because the theme of this conference has been telling a better story. | |
| As someone that you described yourself as an optimist, but you're obviously not feeling particularly optimistic at the moment. | ||
| I mean, what's the story? | ||
| What's the missing line in the story that would turn that around? | ||
| Well, I gave a speech yesterday morning, which is already doing big numbers online. | ||
| People can go and see that. | ||
| I feel like I did a good job of laying out what that might be. | ||
| We just interviewed Neil Ferguson, the historian for trigonometry, and he made the point that if we were sitting here exactly 50 years ago, 1973, the last time Israel was facing an invasion of this scale and an atrocity of this scale, The picture wasn't just bleak in Israel. | ||
| It was also bleak here in the UK. | ||
| It was bleak in America. | ||
| We have recovered from things in the past. | ||
| Perhaps that I like to think I'm a smart guy, but that doesn't mean I can see the future. | ||
| Perhaps there's something coming that I haven't anticipated. | ||
| I'd love to hope that. | ||
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unidentified
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You think there's a chance? | |
| There is always a chance, yeah. | ||
| Dev, good to see you again. |
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