Dec. 3, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| This is a genuine crossroads. | ||
| They generally come along only once in a lifetime. | ||
| The span of a human life is about how often they do come along. | ||
| I always knew they were coming along, and especially in the case of the Jews. | ||
| When I was a little kid, I grew up Jewish. | ||
| I'm a Christian now, but I grew up Jewish, and I'm Jewish by race. | ||
| And I used to say we are holiday Jews because the Holocaust had awakened people to the depth and evil of anti-semitism and Jew hatred. | ||
| It's a very specific thing. | ||
| And I used to say it's a holiday because eventually they'll forget, eventually a new generation will come along. | ||
| One of the biggest mistakes that What we let happen in the narrative, as it's now called, is to let people say that the Holocaust was about bigotry, or that it was about otherness, or that it was about nationalism. | ||
| It was about specifically Jew hatred. | ||
| I'm Dave Urban and joining me today is the host of The Andrew Klavan Show and author of the new book, The House of | ||
| Love and Death, a Cameron Winter Mystery. | ||
| Andrew Klavan, my old friend, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to see you, Dave. | ||
| Andrew, I am now officially confused. | ||
| Have you written more books or been on The Rubin Report more times? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| I think it kind of goes up and down, you know? | ||
| It's like one week it's one thing, the next week it's another thing, but it's a race. | ||
| I always ask you how many books you've written, and you're never quite sure. | ||
| Do you still not know? | ||
| I don't know, but it's over 30. | ||
| I mean, I've written a lot of books. | ||
| I mean, I've been alive for 125 years. | ||
| When you parse it out, it's not that many. | ||
| By years, I guess that's not a terrible thing. | ||
| No, you are quite a prolific writer on top of talking about the news and everything else you're doing with The Daily Wire. | ||
| Before, we're gonna do a little bit of current events and we're gonna talk about the book, obviously, and I wanna talk more broadly also about publishing and what's going on in that world and everything else. | ||
| But do you ever run out of ideas or are you already in your head working on the next thing? | ||
| I'm usually working on the next thing. | ||
| I mean, people who say to me, I want to be a writer, but I don't have any ideas. | ||
| I think, well, then you're not a writer. | ||
| That's why you become a writer, because you have these things you want to say, you have these stories you have to tell. | ||
| It's the kind of profession where you shouldn't do it unless you absolutely have to do it, because it's tough. | ||
| It's a tough profession to get by. | ||
| And I consider myself, I think there are More people who play Major League Baseball at this given moment than there are people like me who make a living writing fiction. | ||
| So it's not something you do for fun. | ||
| I would imagine, though, fiction must sell better than non-fiction. | ||
| Is that? | ||
| That's what I would think. | ||
| Am I wrong? | ||
| Actually, as I was saying, it may be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| First of all, think about promoting it. | ||
| You know, like people tune into shows like ours Because they want to talk about the news, they want to talk about non-fiction. | ||
| If you come on with a, and this is especially true of conservatives, I'm sad to say, conservatives and men, that they listen and say, well, the story's not true, so why do I want to hear it? | ||
| You know, I want to hear about, you know, Herbert Hoover or something like that. | ||
| You know, the purposes of art are mysterious to Americans. | ||
| Europeans understand it better. | ||
| It is a way of expanding your life, expanding your soul, expanding your experience of the world. | ||
| But you have to really think about it before you understand that. | ||
| So it's really hard to go on a news-oriented show and say, look, if you want to know the world better, you should read fiction. | ||
| It's a hard sell. | ||
| Right, I guess what I was trying to say is I wish more people read fiction, because good fiction is actually probably how you get more to the truth than good non-fiction in some weird Jordan Peterson-esque sense, right? | ||
| It's exactly right, and Jordan has a lot to say about it. | ||
| I mean, there's something about Narrative and storytelling, art in general, I would say, that gives you the entire human experience. | ||
| And then when you go back to real life, you have a broader perspective and a deeper perspective and a more humane perspective. | ||
| Art is an incredible tool for increasing your insight and humanity. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, let's bring this back to the world of nonfiction for just a couple of minutes and talk about everything going on in the world, because this last two months at this point have been very, very bizarre. | ||
| I sense that almost everyone across the globe that is at least remotely plugged into what's happening in the world is sensing that the old world is not coming back. | ||
| You could say that about COVID, about a bunch of things, about the original appearance of Trump politically, but that this Israel October 7th event was so horrific, and now subsequently what we're seeing on the streets in Europe, in Canada, here in America, and elsewhere, now this stabbing in Ireland, this election in Argentina, the protests in Spain, This now election in Holland, there is something happening to the world right now. | ||
| Since you have a couple years on me, I only mention that because you mentioned it up top. | ||
| Have you seen this story before? | ||
| These moments where the world starts going in one direction or another direction, or maybe coming back? | ||
| I haven't seen it like this. | ||
| This is a genuine crossroads. | ||
| They generally come along only once in a lifetime. | ||
| The span of a human life is about how often they do come along. | ||
| I always knew they were coming along, and especially in the case of the Jews. | ||
| When I was a little kid, I grew up Jewish. | ||
| I'm a Christian now, but I grew up Jewish, and I'm Jewish by race. | ||
| And I used to say we are holiday Jews because the Holocaust had awakened people to the depth and evil of anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. | ||
| It's a very specific thing. | ||
| And I used to say it's a holiday because eventually they'll forget, eventually a new generation will come along. | ||
| One of the biggest mistakes that we let happen in the narrative, as it's now called, is to let people say that the Holocaust was about bigotry, or that it was about otherness, or that it was about nationalism. | ||
| It was about, specifically, Jew hatred. | ||
| Jew hatred is a unique thing. | ||
| It doesn't expand to other things. | ||
| And of course, I'm against all bigotry, all racial bigotry certainly, but Jew hatred is special because the Jews hold a special place in the history of the world. | ||
| They're the authors of the Bible and you don't have to believe in God to understand that this is true. | ||
| People hate God. | ||
| God expects something of them that they don't want to give. | ||
| He expects something better of them than they know they are. | ||
| He shines a light on the shame they have for the brokenness of their inner selves. | ||
| And they want to erase it. | ||
| They think that by erasing the Jews, they'll erase the people who wrote the book on God. | ||
| And so in these moments when evil arises, Jew hatred rises with it, and it's shocking to see, and it's shocking to see, it's disgusting to see. | ||
| I mean, the things that Hamas did are obviously disgusting, but it's disgusting to see students at Harvard, at other top universities, and other not-top universities coming out and supporting that without the professors thinking to themselves, Oh my God, what have I done? | ||
| Not one professor has come out and said, I taught these kids wrong. | ||
| I did something terribly wrong. | ||
| Some of them probably privately think it, or maybe can't believe that they had something to do with this, but I guess probably a whole bunch of them are happy with the indoctrination. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| And they don't see, I mean, ideology, I mean, Solzhenitsyn talks about this a lot, ideology can blind you. | ||
| To the evil that you're doing and make you think that the evil is good. | ||
| All of us in our hearts, we have this conscience, this God-given conscience. | ||
| We do spot things, little things like the slaughtering of babies and the raping of women. | ||
| We think, ah yes, that's evil. | ||
| But an ideology can convince you that that's somehow justified. | ||
| And that is the ideology that's being taught on our campuses. | ||
| The Democrat Party is in a Hilariously wicked, darkly hilarious state where their young people are basically saying to Joe Biden, you know, you don't hate the Jews enough. | ||
| And Biden is scrambling to bring out more hatred because he's living in another generation. | ||
| What would be the story that we should be telling that would get us out of this? | ||
| I don't mean just the Jews, but like the West. | ||
| And you know, I was in London a couple of weeks ago at Jordan Peterson's art conference, and that was what the purpose of the entire conference was. | ||
| What are the better stories that the West has, we've just completely forgotten how to tell our story. | ||
| And whether you like it or not, the Hamasniks that are chanting on the streets, their story is pretty freaking clear. | ||
| We're here for world domination. | ||
| We're going to kill you. | ||
| And by the way, we got this trans idiot is going to help me do it. | ||
| And I'll behead him when I'm done with you guys. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My response to that is very unpopular. | ||
| It is the one thing that nobody wants to admit. | ||
| We're going to have to start talking about God and we're going to have to say, you know, there is a God space in every person. | ||
| I think it was Pascal who said there's a God shaped hole in every human being. | ||
| And there's, you know, we went from the new atheism. | ||
| They're now talking about the new agnosticism. | ||
| Jordan Peterson and I have gone back and forth on this, you know, a time to come out and say, Yes, I don't know there's a God, but yes, I do have faith and I will act as if there is a God. | ||
| And that will either, just as when you act as if there's gravity, your life goes better. | ||
| You can't see gravity, but if you act as if it's there, your life is going to go better. | ||
| The same thing happens with God. | ||
| You see him when you believe in him. | ||
| And in fact your life goes better. | ||
| We can't make the arguments we have to make without saying that we are created creatures. | ||
| This comes up in transgenderism very obviously. | ||
| You hear people on the right saying it's not natural or it can't be done. | ||
| Well one day it'll be done and who cares if it's natural. | ||
| Air conditioning isn't natural and I love it you know. | ||
| That's not the answer. | ||
| The answer is we are created in a certain way and it's good. | ||
| It is a good thing. | ||
| You were given a gift and with that gift comes responsibilities. | ||
| And so When we start talking rationally about the actual state of human affairs, we'll be able to argue back this basic libertarian idea that somehow it's good for you to be free. | ||
| Why is it good? | ||
| What's good about it? | ||
| People do terrible things when they're free. | ||
| And yet, what a man is, what a human being is, is someone who should be free. | ||
| And you can't make that argument without saying you're created that way. | ||
| So when is when, then, is my question to you. | ||
| When is when? | ||
| When will we do this? | ||
| Because I know that there are some people, obviously online, I think we're amongst them, that are trying to have these conversations, trying to wake people up, trying not to do all of the awful things that have led us here. | ||
| But our entire cultural apparatus, the mainstream media, the New York Times, they're still lying about absolutely everything. | ||
| Virtually all of our politicians are lying about absolutely everything. | ||
| So when is when? | ||
| Or what gets us to when? | ||
| Well, you know, I'm not as despairing as all that. | ||
| Just because of the fear being exhibited by the left, the fact that Elon Musk developed one social media company that allows, you know, right-wing people to express opinions, right-wing people of goodwill. | ||
| He's not allowing all kinds of hatred. | ||
| He's just allowing right-wing people of goodwill to say why we are the way we are and what we believe in. | ||
| And think of this. | ||
| This is a guy who 10 minutes ago was a hero of the left for his electric cars. | ||
| And now he's being investigated like the shoe sizes are being investigated by the federal government and they're doing everything they can to boycott him and bring it down. | ||
| If they had control of the narrative that they want to have and that's it sometimes appears that they have they wouldn't be working so hard and in such a panic manner to shut us down. | ||
| I don't think they can do it any more than the Catholics could shut down the printing press when the Reformation started. | ||
| I think this information revolution is on our side because we're telling the truth, and I think, and we're right about so many things, that eventually they're just going to have to break and say, we're going to live with these two ideas and let the best one win, and then the game is ours. | ||
| Are you saying, much like Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, that life finds a way, we're gonna be okay one way or another? | ||
| Yeah, life does find a way and freedom finds a way. | ||
| The problem is that freedom is harder because people don't want to be free, they want to be given stuff, they want to be safe, they want to have food, they want to make sure they're not going to fall through the cracks. | ||
| So freedom is frightening. | ||
| But life Tends toward freedom. | ||
| It tends toward the moral. | ||
| It tends toward the good. | ||
| Nobody really thinks that a man can become a woman. | ||
| Nobody really thinks that raping and murdering is a good thing. | ||
| They have to be talked into that. | ||
| And so you come back to the natural self, the created self. | ||
| And then you have to start asking yourself questions as I did when I was late in my 40s. | ||
| I started to say, well, if it's true, if it's true that raping someone to death and then desecrating her body while crowds cheer is a bad thing, what makes it bad? | ||
| Who says it's bad? | ||
| Where does this badness and goodness, where do these ideas of badness and goodness come from? | ||
| When you start asking those basic questions, you got to come home. | ||
| And once you come home, I think the entire enlightenment starts again. | ||
| The question, you know, Mark Stein used to say this, you know, if it can't continue, it will stop, but it matters whether you stop at the top of the cliff or after you've gone over the edge. | ||
| Right, and that does seem to be the problem that the Enlightenment liberals are all having right now, that it all kinda worked when things were good and we had strong men and strong societies, but when things start crumbling, then your tolerance is starting to seem a little thin. | ||
| Let me just ask you one other thing that you mentioned, and then we can talk a bit about the book. | ||
| Because you were born Jewish, grew up Christian, we've discussed this on a couple different shows over time, but in light of the last two months, How do you, I don't know if reconcile is the right word, but knowing you come from the people that this horrific thing happened to, your belief system now is sort of part two of that belief system, yet you obviously have an affinity for the culture and all that. | ||
| How do you piece all this together just personally right now? | ||
| Or spiritually, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, I never made the mistake of saying I'm now no longer a Jew. | ||
| I always knew that when the hatred arose I would not be exempt, so I was never kidding myself. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, you do know they're still going to come for you, you tough Christian Jew. | |
| I also disagree with an old A theory of Christianity which is sometimes called replacement, you know, theology or secessionism, you know, where they say that yes, the Jews were the favored people of God, the chosen people of God, and now we have replaced them. | ||
| I believe that we have been added on, that the Christians have been added on to this Jewish God. | ||
| I went out to visit my sister out in California, and she's a friend of Barry Weiss. | ||
| And Barry, I don't know if you know Barry, but she likes to nip at you. | ||
| I love her to death, but she loves to nip at you. | ||
| And she was saying to me, well, how do you reconcile, like, if we don't believe in Jesus, we're going to hell? | ||
| And I said, you know, my actual opinion, not lying to you, as a Jew, you're driving a Model T Ford, and you could be driving a Tesla, but a Model T Ford's a good car. | ||
| It'll get you there. | ||
| And that is kind of the way I feel about it. | ||
| That God chose the Jews to reintroduce himself into the world and in doing that he shaped their hearts in a certain way and at some point that became a thing that could be given to the rest of the world through Jesus. | ||
| That's the way I see it so I've been kind of saved from getting into stupid You know, life's not a game show. | ||
| It's not like he gets the right name of God and you go to heaven, bing, bing, bing, you know? | ||
| It's like you have to find that thing in yourself that loves, that is patient, that is kind, and then you're on the right path. | ||
| And yes, do I think that Christ is the best way to do that? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| But I do think that people who don't know that name can find that place in their hearts where he lives. | ||
| So I'm not really concerned about it. | ||
| For the record, I am a Jew, although I do have a Model X. Now you're going to hell anyway. | ||
| It's a personal thing with you. | ||
| This has nothing to do with theology. | ||
| Talk to me about Cameron Winter. | ||
| Cameron Winter has been now in how many books? | ||
| You must at least know that. | ||
| Yes, I do know that. | ||
| This is the third book with Cameron Winter and just this very day I sent in the manuscript for the fourth book and the fifth one is under contract, so the series is continuing. | ||
| They've all been bestsellers, so it's been great. | ||
| And you know, the thing is, everything that we were just talking about, maybe not the religious parts of it, well, even the religious parts of it, I wanted to put this guy who was a bad guy in his day, but is now trying to become a good guy, I wanted to put him into a society like ours, which is reaching a crisis point. | ||
| And we were talking about this before. | ||
| I think these are issues that you can explore better in art than you can just ranting and just theorizing and even, you know, just using statistics. | ||
| When you put a man who the audience can identify with and can understand what he's looking for, when you put him in a situation that's like our situation, you can see it more deeply. | ||
| And so these are stories about a guy moving through an America that is at crisis point. | ||
| and even maybe a bit beyond where we are. | ||
| He's moving through an America. | ||
| It takes place now, but it's just a little bit ahead of now. | ||
| And he's a guy who, like in the House of Love and Death, he's a guy who goes into enclaves | ||
| of surviving civilizations. | ||
| So this is a little gated community he goes into where a family has been wiped out and he starts to realize how the corruption of the world around it is seeping in to any place where you try to escape and that's what the books are about and they're about a man trying to make sense of the world and trying to find the truth in a world like that. | ||
| So you know, it's funny, I haven't read the book yet, I am gonna read it, but I was reading the synopsis, and what you just described right there, I was thinking, oh man, that's my fear for Florida, that we have our little community here, our little safe community here, but you can't fully inoculate yourself from the rest of the world. | ||
| Yeah, and my argument is that the individual's search for meaning, for justice, for truth, These are the things that bring society back. | ||
| It's not the next election. | ||
| It's never going to be one thing or another. | ||
| It's always going to be individuals coming forward and saying, wait a minute, we're on the wrong track. | ||
| I'm going to live on a different track, even if they throw me to the lions, because this is the truth. | ||
| This is the meaning of my life. | ||
| I was so Elevated by the news that I and Hersia Lee, a woman I greatly admire, I think you have expressed that. | ||
| Yeah, we're good friends. | ||
| I adore her. | ||
| She's an angel. | ||
| She actually is an angel. | ||
| She is one of the most noble people, I think, in our public life. | ||
| And after years of being one of the new atheists, she basically found Christ in a similar way to the way I did, which was basically saying, you know, I now believe there's a God, but what's he like? | ||
| And then you suddenly realize you're rewriting the Gospels. | ||
| And you think like, well, it'd be a lot easier if I just take what's already on the table. | ||
| And I think that that is something I've been predicting for years, that a new birth of faith is going to come down, not from the streets, not from the street preachers, not from the tents. | ||
| It was going to come down from the elite because they realize that they're walking in emptiness and in a wasteland. | ||
| And I think that that's what happened to T.S. | ||
| Eliot in his time. | ||
| He knew he was in a wasteland and he found faith. | ||
| And I think it's going to happen again, because it's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| You know, I keep making this argument, and I know some people... When I was an atheist, or even an agnostic, and you said the word Jesus, or even God, it felt to me like you were dropping a caterpillar down the back of my neck. | ||
| I'd be like, no, don't talk about that. | ||
| But once you see it, you can't unsee it. | ||
| And I think when people like I and Hershey Ali are seeing it, then a lot of people are going to start to see it as well. | ||
| And I've been predicting this, as I say, for over a decade. | ||
| I think it's coming now. | ||
| Yeah, well, I suppose when you see a secular world that, as you referenced, tells you boys are girls and that rape is good, that people start going, okay, maybe there's some old book that might be a little... I mean, that really is... I've thought that a lot over the last couple of months. | ||
| You know, and I've been on my own spiritual journey, and coming back to a lot of these things, and it's like, for as crazy as you might say any of these stories are, that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that Jonah lived in a whale, or any of these things, it's like, well, it's not that crazy considering that, you know, the Department of Education thinks that a guy with a penis is a woman, so. | ||
| And you know, as a storyteller, I read the Bible. | ||
| I do not read the Bible literally in every way, you know. | ||
| I mean, I think that there are stories in the Bible, there are legends, there are myths, there are all kinds of ways of communicating the truth, because the truth is so complex and so deep that you can't just say one thing. | ||
| And the people who say that everything has to be taken literally, they haven't read the Bible, because the Bible says that's not true. | ||
| The Bible says that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. | ||
| I'm not dismissing everything in the Bible as metaphor or myth or poetry. | ||
| I'm simply saying there are moments when you're dealing with different genres because it takes every genre to tell a truth that deep. | ||
| And to be honest, you know, if you read the first three or four chapters of Genesis and you don't see the human condition plumb to its depths, you're not reading it right because that's the most profound piece of Writing on earth, really. | ||
| And I think that when you read the Bible right, it explains so much. | ||
| And not just about the world, but about your own life. | ||
| It's an amazing, amazing book. | ||
| I got one more for you, because as I was reading the synopsis, the last line here, I'm going to just read you a portion of it. | ||
| They're talking about Cameron Winter. | ||
| He can't resist the chance to apply this deductive power in the pursuit of justice, For the victims. | ||
| And I read the whole thing and I thought, man, the word justice has been so mucked up lately. | ||
| You're talking about justice of victims that have been killed, rightly so, providing them justice. | ||
| But the word justice, because of social justice, I think when people hear the word justice now, they mean something very, very different. | ||
| Well, I'm not the first person to say that the left has a habit of taking perfectly Definitive words, putting a modifier in front of them that means no. | ||
| So if you have justice, what does justice mean? | ||
| It means people get what they deserve. | ||
| That's what justice means. | ||
| You know, so the murderer gets something very different than the decent man, than the saint. | ||
| They're going to get a different thing. | ||
| But when you put social justice in front of it, when you call it social justice, that means no justice. | ||
| It means that people are not getting the justice they deserve. | ||
| And we see that in our cities when, you know, rapists are set free and rape again, and then people kill killers in self-defense and they're prosecuted so we see | ||
| that happening right now but the thing is what what | ||
| Cameron Winter doesn't want is he doesn't want things to to not make sense. Making sense is one of the | ||
| most profound things you can do with life. When you say something that doesn't | ||
| make sense like oh yeah these people who are raping and murdering and beheading | ||
| babies these are the good guys | ||
| When you say that, a little bell should go off in your head and say, well, wait a minute, I gotta go back somewhere along the line in my logic progression. | ||
| I made a mistake. | ||
| And so that's what Cameron Winter does. | ||
| He's not a professional detective. | ||
| He's a guy who sometimes reads a story in the news and thinks, wait a minute, that explanation doesn't make sense. | ||
| And he goes in to find the real story. | ||
| And that, to me, is a very powerful thing, even when only one person does it. | ||
| The book is The House of Love and Death, and Andrew, as a man who has converted once, my continued quest to get you to convert from whiskey to tequila is still out there, man. | ||
| It's still out there. | ||
| That's a little deep for me. | ||
| That's not religion. | ||
| That's too deep, I'm sorry. | ||
| It was good to see you, my friend. | ||
| We're gonna link to the book right down below. | ||
| Thanks a lot, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| 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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