Nov. 14, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
17:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| There are many differences among conservatives on a whole host of issues. | ||
| But on certain fundamental issues, there really does seem to be agreement, including the genius of the founders of the United States, and I believe it was genius, when I will say the term, and it strikes most Americans as worthy of a yawn, limited government. | ||
| They don't understand the holiness, the goodness of that idea. | ||
| Governments created every single genocide of the 20th century. | ||
| Why people put faith in big government? | ||
| They laugh at people who put faith in God, in Christ, in the Bible. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| In terms of irrationality, you win heads down with faith in government. | ||
| Yeah, I mean most of the killing. | ||
| 99%! | ||
| The only non-governmental slaughter of the 20th century was the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis. | ||
| That was the only non-governmental slaughter. | ||
| But 99% of the 100 million slaughtered, not combat, these are not combatants, | ||
| not people in the war, was done by big government. | ||
|
unidentified
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Alright Prager, you get no intro. | |
| Because? | ||
| Because we're doing this like every other week at this point. | ||
| Oh, that is funny. | ||
| Whether it's in LA, Florida, now we're in London, but basically this is like your fifth time on the show in the last seven days. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's fine with me. | ||
| What do you think about this arc thing? | ||
| We've got to tell a better story and maybe we can fix some of what's going on with the world. | ||
| So, it's a very interesting question. | ||
| It doesn't sound like it's an interesting question, you know, what do you think of this gathering? | ||
| But I get strength from it, that there are people from many parts of the world here. | ||
| You know, and I will say, I probably shouldn't, but I don't self-censor much. | ||
| I will tell you on a very personal note, That there is a deep sense of gratification, gratitude, in me. | ||
| The number of people who come over to me, mostly young, from different parts of the world, and say that I've touched their life, PragerU has touched their life. | ||
| Because you feel it too. | ||
| You know, we do a lot of our work when we're not speaking, obviously, in front of an audience, alone. | ||
| You sit in a room, and you talk. | ||
| You don't know if, you don't know anyone is watching. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't know anyone is listening. | |
| So when a man comes over to me, three came over to me from Albania. | ||
| Wanted you to know you have such an impact in Albania. | ||
| And I think, really? | ||
| I didn't say that to the guy. | ||
| But I'm thinking, really? | ||
| That, that's, I'll tell you how, this is, my wife is going to crack up, who's in the room, for totally random reasons. | ||
| The emoji that I use periodically in text messaging is not a happy face or anything. | ||
| It's the Albanian flag. | ||
| It's completely random. | ||
| It means nothing except... I don't think I've ever gotten the emoji. | ||
| Oh, you haven't? | ||
| Well, we don't text enough. | ||
| You would. | ||
| You would eventually. | ||
| The man, you will crack up, I'm looking at my wife, comes over to me and goes, I'm just curious, why do you use our flag as your emoji? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How does he know? | ||
| that. Yeah. How does he? I don't know. I don't to this minute. Unless you've been texting. But I | ||
| don't all I'm saying is that that's a that's you work you work and you work in life you want to | ||
| touch people with good better ideas and then you find that some have been and I don't exaggerate | ||
| there are seven but seven billion people on earth I always know how many I haven't touched | ||
| much more than I think of those I did. | ||
| But nevertheless, that's gratifying. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| There there there was also obviously there it's interesting there are many differences among conservatives on a whole host of issues But on certain fundamental issues there really does seem to be agreement Including the genius of the founders of the United States and I believe it was genius when I will say the term and it strikes most Americans as worthy of a yawn Limited government. | ||
| They don't understand the holiness, the goodness of that idea. | ||
| Governments created every single genocide of the 20th century. | ||
| Why people put faith in big government? | ||
| They laugh at people who put faith in God, in Christ, in the Bible. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| In terms of irrationality, you win heads down with faith in government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean most of the killing. | |
| 99%! | ||
| The only non-governmental slaughter of the 20th century was the Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis. | ||
| That was the only non-governmental slaughter. | ||
| But 99% of the 100 million slaughtered, not combat, these are not combatants, not people in the war, was done by big government. | ||
| When you think of the Albanian guy and the emoji, limited government, what Jordan's trying to do here is tell a better story. | ||
| Are you shocked in all of your years doing this that somehow, this is the question I've been asking everybody, that the West did not sell the story or that we gave up the story or we got confused about the story or whatever it is that has led us to where we're at now? | ||
| I'll tell you how not shocked I am. | ||
| I began lecturing at 21. | ||
| I have a very strange life, but I'm just making your listeners aware of that. | ||
| I know how odd that is, but I did. | ||
| I began speaking at 21. | ||
| By the age of 25, I would look at audiences, and I would say to them, and of course these were my parents' age, basically, adult audiences, and I would say to them, Your motto has been, we're going to give our children everything we didn't have. | ||
| And you did. | ||
| The problem is, you didn't give us anything you did have. | ||
| You, and I meant patriotism, love of country, God, the centrality of the community, all, it was all gone in the name of No more war and no more poverty. | ||
| And by the way, that's fascinating to me because you're talking two generations off me. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Because you're one generation off me, you're talking about your parents' generation. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| So that really shows the... How long, right. | ||
| So when people say, correctly, the greatest generation, in terms of the Depression and World War II, they were awesome. | ||
| In terms of continuing the American story, the Western story, to use Jordan's terminology, zilch. | ||
| Not all, obviously. | ||
| My parents did. | ||
| My parents raised me to believe I was the luckiest Jew in history to live in America. | ||
| And he wrote his thesis in college on anti-Semitism in America. | ||
| And he still told me we're the luckiest Jews in the history of the world. | ||
|
unidentified
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Your dad? | |
| Yes, my dad. | ||
| His senior class thesis, City College of New York, was about Jews not allowed at the country clubs, Jews not allowed to live in certain places, Harvard having a quota on Jews, and still said, correctly, this was the greatest place Jews ever lived. | ||
| So I know this is obviously a very sort of sanguine and depressing moment for a lot of people but I saw you a couple days ago in LA at this RFK speech or at this RFK talk that we were doing and you know you talk about defending America that's what you've been doing for your whole life but also defending the Jewish people and spreading the ideas of Judaism. | ||
| This is a terrible moment in our history and I feel like that must sway on you probably in a way that It's even deeper than most people who are just kind of getting caught up. | ||
| It weighs on me, but interestingly, it doesn't shock me. | ||
| Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and I wrote, when we were 30, a book that's still in print, third edition, Why the Jews? | ||
| The Reason for Anti-Semitism. | ||
| And we cite the 2,000-year-old line, and maybe even older than that, and it's in every Passover service. | ||
| In every generation they arise to annihilate us. | ||
| And I always point out, not to persecute us, not to enslave us, to annihilate. | ||
| The Hebrew word, I know Hebrew well, is to make an end to us. | ||
| So, this is going to sound over the top to many of your listeners, I don't care, but feeling comfortable is less important than knowing truths. | ||
| So I think As many Jews do, especially my age. | ||
| I was born after World War II, but not much. | ||
| And I've thought all of my life, what was it like for a Jew to enter the gas chamber? | ||
| It's a dark thought, but if you don't think about dark things, it's because you're somewhat of a coward. | ||
| You're not willing to look at the darkness. | ||
| And so I would think, what was it like, and I came up with an idea that is startling even to most Jews. | ||
| I said, I think there was really only one division among the Jews in the gas chambers. | ||
| Not religious, not religious, not intellectual, not intellectual, not rich, certainly not rich, not poor, basically nothing. | ||
| The biggest division I believe was between those who knew why they were being killed and those who didn't. | ||
| There's no doubt in my mind that evil concentrates on Jews. | ||
| First, never last. | ||
| Non-Jews are spectacularly foolish if they think that Hitler is a Jewish problem only. | ||
| They think Hamas is only a Jewish problem. | ||
| The stupidity and the self-destructive nature of that belief is indescribable. | ||
| Had the non-Jewish world understood that That those who hate Jews and wish to hurt them will hurt you next They would have stopped Hitler and tens of millions of non-jews would have been saved. | ||
| Okay, just for the record Yeah, okay same with Hamas if you don't understand they are this generation's Nazis You are lying to yourself and that is the worst sin you can commit. | ||
| It is one thing if you lie to others There's hope for you. | ||
| If you lie to yourself, there's no hope for you. | ||
| I And so I am not shocked at the barbarity of Jew haters. | ||
| Not in the least. | ||
| It doesn't shock me. | ||
| I am angered. | ||
| It's depressing, but it's not shocking. | ||
| So that's my answer to your question about what I'm going through. | ||
| Is it the great irony of the Jews? | ||
| It's baked in the code. | ||
| As you just said, this is something that's told at Passover, that my grandparents and their grandparents and the great... and it always happens. | ||
| So it's almost like, in an odd way, these things are inevitable. | ||
| Well, do you think that means that our constant desire to destroy this minority is... I mean, if it's baked in the code, that's kind of upsetting. | ||
| The Jews brought the God of the Bible, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, Adam and Eve, Christianity brought all of this into the world. | ||
| Those who hate those things hate the Jews. | ||
| The idea that God judges me on my behavior, not on my faith alone, is a hateful idea to fundamentalist Muslims, for whom God judges solely on whether you believe in Allah and the Quran or not. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And if you don't, as Ibn Khaldun, the greatest Arab writer who ever lived, wrote, it is, we are the greatest religion because we kill to make, we kill people if they don't convert, whereas Jews and Christians don't do that. | ||
| He actually wrote that. | ||
| I cite him in my book, Still the Best Hope, on America, Islam, and leftism. | ||
| So, people don't want to acknowledge this. | ||
| That from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free means annihilate Israel. | ||
| Israel is from the river to the sea. | ||
| So that's all it means. | ||
| It means exterminate a state. | ||
| There is no other example of that in the world today. | ||
| So the answer, you asked me about it, so here, you'll like this. | ||
| In the Talmud, the holiest Jewish text after the Bible, and about 1800 years ago, The rabbis asked, why are the Jews hated? | ||
| And they spent very little time on the subject. | ||
| They spend, as I often tell people, they spend a whole volume on whether you can eat an egg born on a Jewish holy day. | ||
| And I'm not mocking it, I'm just saying it's filled with very long discussions of such subjects. | ||
| But antisemitism gets a few paragraphs, because there was no complexity. | ||
| And they said it with a play on Hebrew words, which anyone listening will understand, because the words sound so similar. | ||
| The word for hatred is Sinai. | ||
| The word for Sinai, as in Mount Sinai, where the Ten Commandments was given, is Sinai. | ||
| Sinai and Sinah sound almost identical, correct? | ||
| They have different consonants in Hebrew, but that's irrelevant. | ||
| They sound virtually the same. | ||
| They said the great Sinai comes from Sinai. | ||
| The Jews got the Torah at Sinai, the Jews are hated for the Torah. | ||
| And they're absolutely right. | ||
| And therefore, I have argued my whole life, without making really great progress, I admit it, that the answer to antisemitism is the cause of antisemitism. | ||
| Spread the Torah's values. | ||
| No one has to be a Jew. | ||
| Judaism does not hold that you have to be a Jew to be saved. | ||
| But the best values in the history of the world are contained in those five books, which is why I'm writing my Rational Bible series on each of those five books. | ||
| To explain, all the great answers to evil are in those five books. | ||
| So if the persecution or the hatred is baked in, is the irony of that, or the salvation of that, that the survival is also baked in, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's in every story, every holiday. | ||
| They tried to kill us, they did kill a bunch of us, but let's eat and we're still here. | ||
| So that maybe is the magic? | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that the hope? | |
| Well, yeah, well, the religious Jew goes on. | ||
| One rabbi who lost all of his children, the Nazis murdered every one of his children, like six or eight of them. | ||
| And they asked him, how do you still believe? | ||
| And he had an interesting answer. | ||
| He said, for the believer there are no questions, and for the atheist there are no answers. | ||
| He's overstating it, but his point is well taken. | ||
| He was not prepared. | ||
| Oh, my children were killed by bad people, therefore there is no God. | ||
| It didn't comport to him. | ||
| I don't know why God allowed this to happen. | ||
| That's an unanswerable mystery. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But nevertheless, for the atheist, nothing makes sense. | ||
| Everything is random. | ||
| Including life itself. | ||
| At least the religious person. | ||
| Oh yeah, God created life. | ||
| The atheist? | ||
| Beats me. | ||
| It happened. | ||
| Really, that's their answer. | ||
| Beats me. | ||
| So one way or another, Prager, we will do this again because we survived. | ||
| We'll probably do this again next week, I assume, at your house. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So wait, you meant we, the Jews, or we, you and I? | ||
| I meant both. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
|
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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