Dec. 17, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:41
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Look, Dave, you and Bill Maher and Elon Musk are great examples of people who, for most of your life, you considered yourself left of center. | ||
| And what happened, I think Elon put it beautifully when he tweeted out a spectrum of right to left, and he had the middle and he was left of center, and then the whole spectrum moved like crazy. | ||
| And he's like, what the hell happened? | ||
| I didn't move at all. | ||
| And suddenly he's right of center because the left has gone to crazy town. | ||
| Listen, when I was on Bill Maher, it was awesome. | ||
| I'd never met Bill. | ||
| I didn't know him at all. | ||
| And I started by telling him, I said, Bill, I think what you're doing is really important. | ||
| You're an old school liberal. | ||
| There are a lot of issues you and I disagree on. | ||
| But you believe in free speech. | ||
| That now makes you a radical conservative because you don't want to silence anyone who disagrees with you. | ||
| And I pointed out, I said, look, on your show, you actually have people from right and left. | ||
| I said, there's virtually no show on television that has discussion. | ||
| And I believe if we don't talk to each other, that we're gonna lose the country. | ||
| All right, Senator Ted Cruz, I don't think you need an intro. | ||
| Do you need an intro at this point? | ||
| You're a senator. | ||
| I'm just thrilled to be back. | ||
| You're from Texas. | ||
| You beat me in Nintendo wrestling years ago. | ||
| People get it. | ||
| And you have a new book, Unwoke, How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America. | ||
| I guess my main question to you is in light of everything happening in the world right now, the fact that we're rolling into a presidential election next year, the two months since these horrific attacks, November 7th and everything else, We have to give the woke credit. | ||
| They have destroyed so much of our sensemaking and it sort of feels obvious that this is the moment we're in, right? | ||
| Well, Dave, that's exactly right. | ||
| And it's why I wrote the book, because I think we are at a level of crisis you and I have never seen. | ||
| It's never happened in our lifetime. | ||
| And what's happened, what the book does is it explains how the radical left sees just about every major institution in our country. | ||
| So it starts with universities, and each chapter of the book focuses on a different institution. | ||
| So chapter one is universities. | ||
| I call universities the Wuhan lab of the woke virus. | ||
| That's where it was invented, it's where it mutated, it's where it spread. | ||
| It goes from universities to K-12 education. | ||
| From there to journalism, from there to government, from there to big business, to big tech, to entertainment, Hollywood, movies, television, music, sports, from there to science? | ||
| And then the last chapter is on China, which I think is a central nexus that is intertwined with all of them. | ||
| And what the book does is, number one, it lays out how and why the radical left took over each of these institutions. | ||
| But then number two, even more critically, it lays out a positive, proactive battle plan for here's how we take them back. | ||
| Because I think if we don't take the institutions back, we're going to lose our country. | ||
| What does it say about our institutions, all the institutions that you just mentioned there, from cultural to political to entertainment and everything else, that they all seemingly folded to this thing? | ||
| And it happened on all of our watches. | ||
| I mean, I include all of us in that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, listen, it was deliberate. | ||
| And the book explains, it goes back to the 1960s. | ||
| You look at Marxists. | ||
| Look, Marxism, as you know, originates with Karl Marx. | ||
| Karl Marx laid out a view in the Communist Manifesto that viewed the world as fundamentally in conflict. | ||
| And it's a conflict between oppressors and victims. | ||
| And Marx viewed it in socioeconomic terms. | ||
| So the oppressors were the owners of capital. | ||
| The victims were the proletariat, the working men and women. | ||
| And the solution that Marx advocated for was the violent revolution of the victims, the proletariat, to overthrow their oppressors and use government power to forcibly redistribute the wealth. | ||
| Well, what happened is in the 1960s and 70s, the Marxists began infiltrating universities. | ||
| They began becoming tenured faculty and administrators. | ||
| And from there, it mutated. | ||
| And you began to see different prisms put on Marxism. | ||
| So, critical race theory is the same conflict lens But it's based on race instead of socioeconomic status. | ||
| Queer theory is the same thing, but based on gender and gender identity. | ||
| In every instance, it's a fundamental conflict and supporting the violent revolution of the so-called victims. | ||
| And, you know, you talked a minute ago about what's happening on college campuses, the vicious anti-Semitism we're seeing on college campuses. | ||
| That is a manifestation of the rot Of cultural Marxism. | ||
| I was talking recently with a fellow who's a very successful businessman in Silicon Valley, and he's a man of the left. | ||
| He's been a Democrat his whole life. | ||
| And he was expressing horror at where this anti-Semitism was coming from, and confusion, like, where did it happen? | ||
| And I explained, I said, look, For the radical leftist, they have defined Jews as oppressors. | ||
| And they have defined Palestinians as victims. | ||
| And once they do that, for the cultural Marxist, the policy they support is the violent revolution of the so-called victims against the oppressors. | ||
| And it's why you see Black Lives Matter and university students and professors Cheering for the Hamas terrorists because any violence, any horror is justified for the Marxist once it is the so-called victim overthrowing the oppressor. | ||
| Are you hopeful that at a national level we can reverse this? | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm in Florida where we're doing an awful lot to push against it. | ||
| You're in Texas where you're doing an awful lot. | ||
| But it seems to me when I see these rallies in New York City and in Chicago and these Democrat-run cities, I don't see any will to stop any of this stuff. | ||
| So Dave, I really am optimistic and I'm hopeful. | ||
| And what the book Unwoke does is, as I said, it lays out a battle plan for here's how we turn it around. | ||
| And I really focus on three buckets of tools that we can use to take the institutions back. | ||
| Bucket one is sunlight and transparency. | ||
| Because the ideas of the radical left are wildly unpopular. | ||
| It's simply exposing them as a powerful tool against them. | ||
| Normal, rational people don't support abolishing the police. | ||
| Normal, rational people don't support open borders and the chaos at our southern border. | ||
| Normal, rational people don't root for Hamas terrorists. | ||
| And so sunlight is powerful. | ||
| What I advocate is changing the cost-benefit analysis, and in particular, increasing the cost for individuals and for institutions to go woke. | ||
| Increasing the disincentives. | ||
| And then third, what I advocate... Can you give me a little detail? | ||
| Can you give me a little detail on number two? | ||
| Because I think that's the key one. | ||
| People think they can now just get away with anything at all, with no cost. | ||
| Well, let's take, for example, the chapter I have on big business. | ||
| I do a deep dive into what happened with Bud Light and Target and Disney. | ||
| And in all three instances, you had companies that put woke ideology above their customers. | ||
| They tried to jam it down their customers' throats. | ||
| And in all three instances, the companies faced billions of dollars of losses. | ||
| And what that did Is it, I believe, change the incentive for the next CEO thinking about, am I going to go woke? | ||
| Suddenly the downside of doing so is much more significant. | ||
| I also talk in the book about a bill that the state of Texas passed. | ||
| It was called Senate Bill 13 and it provided, if you boycott oil and gas, oil and gas provides millions of jobs in the state of Texas. | ||
| Texas said, if you boycott oil and gas, The state of Texas will boycott you, and in particular, we will not invest in your fund. | ||
| Texas pension funds, Texas endowments, we've got hundreds of billions of dollars of capital, and if you're going to wage war on jobs in Texas, we're not going to help you on that. | ||
| That was a bill that I advocated, I urged the legislature to pass. | ||
| They did pass. | ||
| And I'll tell you, it's put the fear of God in Wall Street. | ||
| And I've urged other red states, change the cost-benefit analysis. | ||
| Make it expensive to go woke. | ||
| And we're seeing real victories by using economic power to fight back. | ||
| What do you think we can do to get those sane liberals that you referenced before to come around and actually vote the right way? | ||
| You know, I saw you on Real Time with Bill Maher a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Jordan Peterson was on a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Elon Musk was on a couple weeks ago. | ||
| I was on Friday. | ||
| Bill strikes me as the bellwether for what a sane liberal can do. | ||
| I don't know that he can get there, but he represents the type of person that I think ultimately could vote Republican. | ||
| Especially in a place like Texas, a lefty who's waking up. | ||
| What do we do for those people? | ||
| Look Dave, you and Bill Maher and Elon Musk are great examples of people who for most of your life, you considered yourself left of center. | ||
| And what happened, I think Elon put it beautifully when he tweeted out a spectrum of right to left. | ||
| And he had the middle and he was left of center. | ||
| And then the whole spectrum moved like crazy. | ||
| And he's like, what the hell happened? | ||
| I didn't move at all. | ||
| And suddenly he's right of center because the left has gone to crazy town. | ||
| Listen, when I was on Bill Maher, it was awesome. | ||
| I'd never met Bill. | ||
| I didn't know him at all. | ||
| And I started by telling him, I said, Bill, I think what you're doing is really important. | ||
| You're an old school liberal. | ||
| There are a lot of issues you and I disagree on. | ||
| But you believe in free speech. | ||
| That now makes you a radical conservative because you don't want to silence anyone who disagrees with you. | ||
| And I pointed out, I said, look, on your show, you actually have people from right and left. | ||
| I said, there's virtually no show on television. | ||
| That has discussion. | ||
| And I believe if we don't talk to each other, that we're going to lose the country. | ||
| And so I think Elon Musk had never voted Republican until two years ago. | ||
| Mayra Flores was the first Republican he ever cast a ballot for. | ||
| And I do think, listen, we have the opportunity. | ||
| I've been a conservative my whole life, but I think as conservatives, we can defend very simple common sense propositions. | ||
| Things like free speech. | ||
| You know, it's not symmetrical. | ||
| The left wants to silence their opponents. | ||
| The right doesn't. | ||
| I don't want to silence Bernie Sanders. | ||
| I don't want to silence AOC. | ||
| I want everyone to hear their idiocies. | ||
| And I agree with John Stuart Mill. | ||
| The best response to bad speech is more speech. | ||
| And so I think we have an opportunity to be Engaged in simply common sense and to be happy warriors. | ||
| If someone wants to be a socialist, great! | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| They better be prepared to defend the murder, the torture, the misery and the suffering that communism has produced all over the world. | ||
| And one of the things, going back to the book Unwoke, You know, I start the book by telling my father's story. | ||
| As you know, Dave, my father was born in Cuba, grew up in Cuba, and he fought in the Communist Revolution in Cuba. | ||
| He was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. | ||
| And I tell that story, he was 14 years old when he started fighting alongside Fidel Castro. | ||
| And one of the points I make is that Marxists always, always, always start with young people. | ||
| You look at every communist revolution across the globe, it is teenagers who are young and impressionable and passionate, and they don't have life experience to have wisdom. | ||
| It is why the left targets universities and targets K-12 education, because they indoctrinate. | ||
| And quickly, let me get to the third bucket of tools. | ||
| Which is that we need to be fighting in the arena of ideas and in particular taking over the organs of transmission of ideas. | ||
| What you do, Dave, is incredibly important. | ||
| This podcast is incredibly important. | ||
| I do a podcast three days a week, Verdict with Ted Cruz. | ||
| We need to be creating alternative avenues to communicate and I urge conservatives and libertarians with resources who've been successful at business, invest In acquiring organs of transmission of ideas. | ||
| Buy a TV station. | ||
| Buy a radio station. | ||
| Buy a book publishing house. | ||
| Buy a movie studio. | ||
| Buy a record label. | ||
| And the example I use is Elon Musk's. | ||
| Buying Twitter was, I think, the single most important step for free speech in decades. | ||
| I discuss it a lot in the book Unwoke. | ||
| So let me just encourage your viewers. | ||
| You can get Unwoke anywhere you get books. | ||
| Amazon, Barnes & Noble. | ||
| Go buy it, and I'll mention to you, it's obviously the holiday season. | ||
| The book, I think, makes a great Christmas gift. | ||
| And so buy it for your mom, buy it for your best friend, buy it for your crazy left-wing neighbor that you want to knock some sense into. | ||
| Or even better, buy it for your kids or your grandkids, so that they can understand what it is that people are trying to indoctrinate you with, and they can have the tools to know how to fight back. | ||
| A senator and a salesman. | ||
| Very professional, my friend. | ||
| All right, Senator, now you have two reasons to come down to Miami. | ||
| I know you gotta jump, because we're gonna play ball when I get my finger fixed, which I'm working on, and we're gonna go down to Calle Ocho and drink some mojitos in Little Havana, because the Cubans, if there are any people in America right now who get what freedom is, it is the Cubans, and I'm sure they'll be happy to see you. | ||
| And Dave, I'll say, we will do both of those. | ||
| And when you're in D.C., as you know, I play hoops twice a week. | ||
| In fact, it's Tuesday morning right now. | ||
| Tuesday afternoon, we're going to be playing hoops. | ||
| If you're here, I'll warn you, our game is more violence than it is skill. | ||
| So you broke a finger not too long ago. | ||
| One of my staff members broke my thumb. | ||
| I went up for a rebound. | ||
| He jammed it down in my thumb, as I told my 13-year-old daughter. | ||
| Daddy said a very bad word. | ||
| But you'd be proud. | ||
| Even with a broken thumb, we finished the game, we won, and miraculously I scored with a broken thumb. | ||
| I did a finger roll. | ||
| I couldn't shoot. | ||
| I screamed when I tried to shoot. | ||
| But I did a finger roll and scored a bucket with a broken thumb. | ||
| And so, you know, persistence and being stubborn in hell sometimes is better than actually having skill. | ||
| Listen, next time you come on, we're gonna do a 52-year-old and a 47-year-old just explaining all of their career injuries. | ||
| Senator, it was great to see you. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, instead of nonstop screaming, check out our politics playlist. | ||
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