Nov. 15, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
17:16
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| At the end of the day, cultures are shaped by intellectuals. | ||
| They are. | ||
| The left has dominated the space. | ||
| It's dominated the space for a hundred years. | ||
| If we really are serious about changing the world, what we need to do is replace the intellectuals of the left. | ||
| And it might not be in universities, because we might have to create alternative universities or alternative settings in which we educate people. | ||
| But if we—Congress doesn't matter at the end of the day. | ||
| What matters is the culture. | ||
| And we need to have an impact on the culture. | ||
| And if we can't, then we lose. | ||
| And if we can, then we will win, and the politics will take care of themselves. | ||
| But our focus and obsession with politics, I think, diverts our attention from the real issue and the real problem. | ||
| All right, Yaron Brook from the Yaron Brook Show, the chairman of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute, an old | ||
| friend. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And a man who fled America for tax purposes. | ||
| Not America, it's still America. | ||
| Oh, it's still America. | ||
| Fled the mainland. | ||
| You fled the mainland of America for tax purposes because you actually do live the ideals that you talk about in terms of limited government and keeping what's yours and all of that stuff. | ||
| Well, let's talk about the state of the world because the other, the other part of this is that you were born in Israel. | ||
| Uh, most of your family still lives in Israel. | ||
| Obviously we're three weeks into this, this situation. | ||
| Take it from there. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's just horrific. | ||
| Everybody in Israel has been touched by this. | ||
| There's not a family in Israel that does not either have a victim from this in their own family, or they know people who have, or friends, or cousins. | ||
| We all have. | ||
| Everybody who is Israeli, I think, has been touched by this. | ||
| The tragedy of it is all this was preventable. | ||
| The tragedy of this is that Netanyahu, this government, has failed the Israeli people for 20 years now. | ||
| This should not be a surprise. | ||
| Hamas's barbarians should not be a surprise to anybody. | ||
| Hamas is part of a wider network, a wider movement. | ||
| Al-Qaeda is part of that network. | ||
| ISIS is part of that network. | ||
| Hezbollah is part of that network. | ||
| And, of course, it all, in some sense, has a gravitational pull from Iran that's the hub and the center. | ||
| This is all part of a bigger story that started, I think, for most Americans in 9-11, for some of us even before that. | ||
| And it all ties together with 9-11, with Iran, with everything that's happened over the last, really since 1979, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini. | ||
| And it's kind of sad that people don't see the arc and they don't see necessity to deal with it because if we don't deal with it, it's just going to happen again. | ||
| These things are just going to reoccur. | ||
| There is a civilizational battle going on and we, you know, are ignoring it and evading it and doing everything we can to pretend it's not real. | ||
| Do you think this might be the wake-up call that the West needs? | ||
| I mean, it's a little early for that because there's still such chaos and war and hostages and everything else, but I do sense, even from just being here at ARC, people are now talking about this stuff in a new way. | ||
| There's a lot of people in London concerned with the homegrown problem here. | ||
| I mean, you can see at least there seems to be some shift psychologically. | ||
| No, sadly. | ||
| I mean, I don't come to you usually for good. | ||
| Well, I'd like to be really a realist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At some point, I'd like to be kind of the optimist in the room. | |
| But the reality is I've been around, you know, I was very active after 9-11. | ||
| I did a lot of university talks. | ||
| I was active after. | ||
| During the Danish cartoon crisis, which people have already forgotten about. | ||
| And this feels the same. | ||
| After 9-11, all the flags came out, and we went to war, and we did nothing. | ||
| We really did nothing. | ||
| We didn't deal with the problem. | ||
| You know, George Bush and everybody after him, every single administration since, have refused to name the enemy. | ||
| They still talk about Hamas as if it's stuck some abstraction. | ||
| Hamas? | ||
| What is Hamas? | ||
| Nobody talks about the fact that it's an Islamic jihadist motivated by a religion, a particular interpretation of religion, not all Muslims, but a particular interpretation of religion, until we're willing to say the enemy is Islamism, the enemy is totalitarian Islam, however, you know, Islamic fascism, however we want to call it. | ||
| We will not deal with the problem, and we're not going to deal with it. | ||
| You can already see the extent to which Israel is coming under criticism. | ||
| It's only started when the ground operation gets full, you know, really gets into full gear. | ||
| A lot of Palestinians are going to die. | ||
| A lot of Palestinians have already died. | ||
| Many more are going to die. | ||
| With every Palestinian death, the pressure from the West on Israel to stop is going to increase. | ||
| Nobody in the West is willing to deal with what the problem is. | ||
| Yes, we've got an entire fleet of American ships now in the Western Mediterranean or Eastern Mediterranean. | ||
| My guess is they'll do, you know, they'll do some defensive stuff. | ||
| They'll shoot down missiles. | ||
| Good for them. | ||
| But the real enemy is Iran. | ||
| Nobody is talking about going after Iran and actually doing what's necessary. | ||
| The real enemy is Hezbollah. | ||
| If anything, the Biden administration and almost everybody is telling Israel, oh no, you can't deal with both situations at the same time. | ||
| So no, all I see is hesitancy, the same kind of hesitancy I saw after 9-11. | ||
| So what would it look like, actually, for the West to do whatever it is you would want them to do? | ||
| What actually is that? | ||
| Because it seems to me there's two things. | ||
| There's the geopolitical problem in the Middle East, obviously now. | ||
| But there's also the problem we have in our own borders. | ||
| And again, just being in London for two days, it's very obvious here. | ||
| You can't deal with the problem in your own borders unless you recognize that you're a political issue. | ||
| So I believe that the West, the free countries of the world should get together. | ||
| You're not going to use the UN for this. | ||
| So you have to do the free countries of the world need to get together and declare war. | ||
| Literally declare war. | ||
| An axis of allies declaring war on Islamic totalitarianism. | ||
| And that includes, that would include a long list. | ||
| I said this after 9-11, so I'm just repeating myself, right? | ||
| Iran and then all the organizations affiliated from Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the rest of them. | ||
| And they need to declare war on that. | ||
| Basically, under the declaration of war, you can say, if you're a sympathizer, if you're working on their behalf, then that is now, now we can kick you out, we can restrict your ability to protest, we can restrict you, but you can't do that unless you declare war. | ||
| You can't say, yeah, we're for free speech, but this speech we don't like right now. | ||
| But you can, like in America. | ||
| When you declared war on the Nazis, you could restrict the activity of Nazis in America. | ||
| When, you know, you're even in a cold war with the Soviet Union, you can say membership of the Communist Party, that's put. | ||
| You have to make a declaration, and then say, you know, if you're in London, and you support Hamas, you're not welcome here anymore, and we will, if you're not a citizen, we'll extradite you, and if you are a citizen, You know, you might be tried for treason. | ||
| Is the inherent problem that it doesn't seem like the West just has the stomach to do what's right? | ||
| I sense maybe if we got the right administration in America, we might be a little more willing to do it, but it's almost like the ship has sailed from a Western European perspective. | ||
| Yeah, but it sails in America as well. | ||
| There is no right administration. | ||
| I don't believe there is any administration that would be willing to do this. | ||
| This requires the kind of courageous action. | ||
| I mean Trump did a ban on Muslim immigration. | ||
| So he banned all the Muslims from countries that are not a threat to the United States. | ||
| He didn't ban Muslims from Saudi Arabia. | ||
| God forbid we say anything negative about Saudi Arabia or we criticize the Saudis. | ||
| So he was very selective in his banning, not to be too politically, not to upset the people over there that he wants to be friends with. | ||
| You know, his first trip overseas was to Saudi Arabia, where he danced with the princes in a despicable display of... just like every American president. | ||
| You don't remember they put their hand on that glowing ball? | ||
| What the hell was that? | ||
| I don't even know, right? | ||
| I mean, Obama was criticized because he bowed to the Saudis. | ||
| Trump danced with the Saudis. | ||
| They all do something with the Saudis. | ||
| And then Biden pretended to be tough on the Saudis when he first came in. | ||
| And then within a few months, he was over there, you know, kissing the ring. | ||
| So, no, I mean, I don't think the West has the courage. | ||
| I don't think America has the courage. | ||
| I don't think America knows what it represents. | ||
| I, you know, sadly, particularly Trump, I don't think understands America. | ||
| Maybe somebody like DeSantis or Nikki Haley or any one of those, I think, have a better understanding of what America is and what it stands for. | ||
| You have to have a huge amount of self-esteem. | ||
| You have to have a huge amount of esteem in America. | ||
| Believe in its values. | ||
| Know what they are, which is a big issue, right? | ||
| Because Americans don't. | ||
| And be willing to accept domestic resistance and stand up to the world, because you're going to get world resistance. | ||
| And you stand up to the Saudis, stand up to a lot of people in the world. | ||
| And I just don't see an American leader capable of doing that. | ||
| And look, it's not that I blame the leadership. | ||
| At the end of the day, we've talked about this, I think, in the past, right? | ||
| You get the leaders you deserve. | ||
| We get the politicians we deserve. | ||
| At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue. | ||
| It's an educational issue. | ||
| As long as the American culture doesn't understand what America is, then you can't expect this leadership to buck the culture, to stand up to the culture. | ||
| You know, no leader is going to lead from the position of, I'm opposed to the dominant culture in my own country. | ||
| So what we need is still to do what we continue to do, which is try to educate people, try to change people's minds, and we'll get down the road that someday we'll get the right kind of political leadership. | ||
| At the end of the day, cultures are shaped by intellectuals. | ||
| They are. | ||
| The left has dominated the space. | ||
| It's dominated the space for a hundred years. | ||
| If we really are serious about changing the world, what we need to do is replace the intellectuals of the left. | ||
| And it might not be in universities, because we might have to create alternative universities or alternative settings in which we educate people. | ||
| But if we—Congress doesn't matter at the end of the day. | ||
| What matters is the culture. | ||
| And we need to have an impact on the culture. | ||
| And if we can't, then we lose. | ||
| And if we can, then we will win, and the politics will take care of themselves. | ||
| But our focus and our obsession with politics, I think, diverts our attention from the real issue and the real problem. | ||
| When you see the rot that is now fully exposed at our universities, I mean, I know you've been talking about this for a long time. | ||
| One of the things I was always so impressed when I was doing a lot of events with the Ayn Rand Institute, was that everyone really took ideas seriously. | ||
| There was a real commitment to debating ideas, to bringing on people. | ||
| I mean, you guys were always getting me to bring on people, that caljure to your ideas. | ||
| And clearly that has not happened at universities. | ||
| But are you still, like the level of insanity right now in the last couple of weeks, It's shocking to me even though I knew it was right there. | ||
| Are you shocked at all or it's just like very obvious? | ||
| The extent of it, the influence it's had and the willingness now to say murder and rape and beheading of children is okay if it's in the right cause. | ||
| Post-colonialism, as long as you do it to colonialists, it's okay. | ||
| I think we meant by decolonization. | ||
| Yeah, this is what they meant. | ||
| And so the extent of it and the viciousness of it is somewhat surprising, but not really when you think about it, right? | ||
| This was inevitable. | ||
| This is where it leads. | ||
| There will be a backlash against this. | ||
| American culture will rebel against it. | ||
| The American culture fundamentally is not yet ready quite to embrace that nuttiness. | ||
| I've always thought that the ultimate slide towards authoritarianism in America will not come from the left, because the left is too insane for the American people to actually embrace it. | ||
| It will have to come from... That's interesting. | ||
| No, I think the left will never dominate in America. | ||
| It might in Europe, but it will never dominate in America. | ||
| It'll dominate the universities for a while, but the backlash again, they don't know what's coming. | ||
| So we can sort of dominate culturally, but not necessarily fully politically. | ||
| Well, there's a sense in which, look, there's a sense, what does it mean to dominate culture? | ||
| It means that they diminish the role of reason, where they've already done that. | ||
| They elevate emotion. | ||
| Identitarian politics, they've elevated identitarian politics. | ||
| But you see, the kind of emotion, the kind of nihilism, and the kind of identitarianism that they advocate for, nobody's going to buy, and it's never going to be a majoritarian perspective. | ||
| But, once you unleash that after-the-bottle, right? | ||
| Once you unleash that genie of it, it's tyrannism, emotionalism, authoritarianism. | ||
| Somebody will exploit it, and it might not be somebody they like. | ||
| Now, you know, not to make this a comparison, but it's thought history does see some parallels. | ||
| You know, when Hitler came to power, the dominant, the dominant culture in Germany was left. | ||
| It was, the volume of the Trump public was dominated by the left. | ||
| There were more communists than there were fascists. | ||
| But Hitler was so good at what he did. | ||
| He coalesced the communists on his side. | ||
| He coalesced that leftist ideology on his side because, again, they had unleashed emotionalism, authoritarianism, and he exploited that. | ||
| And I fear that we are heading towards some kind of authoritarian who will wrap himself with a flag. | ||
| He might wrap himself with religion. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's likely. | ||
| So you think it would be someone from the right, though, that would grab the political power? | ||
| Yes, but it will be the same outcome. | ||
| Look, right, left, I don't know what they mean. | ||
| I used to think of myself somewhat on the right. | ||
| My view of the political spectrum is individualism, collectivism. | ||
| And collectivism, you've got lots of different types. | ||
| Some of them are the right, some of them are the left, some of them are the center. | ||
| You've got lots of different types of collectivism. | ||
| Individualism, there's not a lot of us. | ||
| And that's the fundamental battle. | ||
| It's individualism versus collectivism. | ||
| And unfortunately, the left and right both seem to be drifting towards collectivism. | ||
| What do you think we can do, from an American perspective, just sort of, I do think we have some protections because we do, our states are so different, our foundational documents are better. | ||
| I mean, is there anything else we can do besides expose some of this stuff and hope that the people start waking up? | ||
| Well, I think exposing some of this stuff is a big part of it, but maybe more important, what we can do is offer an alternative. | ||
| And it shouldn't be hard in America, because the alternative is basically the Founding Fathers. | ||
| The Founding Fathers of America are the alternative to what's the insanity going on today. | ||
| It's a vision of liberty. | ||
| It's a vision of individualism. | ||
| It's a vision of the pursuit of happiness, but a pursuit of happiness guided by, as Jefferson would say, reason. | ||
| And it is a vision of separation of church and state. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| You can have any religion you want. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| But just don't impose it on me. | ||
| And so our roots, the roots of America are in the Enlightenment, are in the Declaration, are in the Constitution. | ||
| If we can resurrect the spirit of the Founders, if we can bring back... And that's a positive vision. | ||
| And I think that's true of Europe. | ||
| Europe needs to rediscover its own roots in the Enlightenment. | ||
| It needs to rediscover John Locke and Adam Smith and the thinkers, the Scottish Enlightenment, Montesquieu and the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, Diderot. | ||
| I mean, these are the great thinkers that I think made the West the West. | ||
| They made America and they made Europe. | ||
| Right here is the foundation of Western civilization. | ||
| We're sitting right now in London and But, you know, Scotland and France, this is the axis that made the West the West. | ||
| And these are the ideas that need to be resurrected. | ||
| We don't have to... I think we need to improve on those ideas, but we don't have to reinvent the wheel. | ||
| The foundations are here. | ||
| And so that is the positive vision, a positive vision of... | ||
| That's great! | ||
| We need to embrace stuff like that. | ||
| put it in economic terms of, you know, Mark Andreessen just published this, | ||
| he's a venture capitalist, published this Techno Optimist Manifesto. | ||
| That's great, we need to embrace stuff like that. | ||
| Something, you know, things about how wonderful the future can be | ||
| if we get rid of this identitarian nonsense, if we get rid of this emotionalism | ||
| that has dominated our culture and our politics, and if we focus on what we're capable of doing, | ||
| capable of producing. | ||
| Well, that's exactly what ARK is doing right now. | ||
| That's why we're here. | ||
| And I actually finished on an optimistic note? | ||
| You did it! | ||
| It was a miracle. | ||
| That means end communication! | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of non-stop screaming, check out our politics 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