Dave Rubin, Carol Markowitz, and Gad Saad dissect Tucker Carlson's tense interview with Vladimir Putin, who denied Ukraine's statehood, cited 1654 borders, and claimed a US-blocked Istanbul peace deal while mocking Carlson's FBI rejection. The panel then critiques a DOJ report on President Biden's cognitive lapses regarding his vice presidency and son Beau's death, highlighting Democratic reluctance to act. Finally, they analyze Sunny Hostin's refusal to acknowledge slaveholding ancestors and Mayor Tiffany Henyard's luxury spending, illustrating a broader societal inability to update beliefs despite contradictory evidence. [Automatically generated summary]
This is The Rubin Report, and it's time for another Friday roundtable extravaganza.
Joining me today is New York Post columnist and host of The Carol Markowitz Show, Carol Markowitz, and a professor, author, and evolutionary behavioral scientist, and multiple, multiple, multiple Rubin Report guest, making another return, Gad Saad.
We're going to recap just like a crazy weekend, the last 24 hours, particularly with the DOJ releasing some Sort of secretive but not so secretive stuff about Joe Biden that we've kind of all known.
And then of course there was the big Tucker Carlson Putin interview last night.
And then we were gonna throw in some Sonny Hostin and other assorted crazy racist people stuff.
But let's just dive right in.
The big thing yesterday was that Tucker went to Russia.
He talked to Putin.
We're gonna show you a couple clips here.
And let's start with a bit on why Putin says he's going into Ukraine now and not 22 years ago.
Okay, so I want to get into some of the specifics about redrawing maps and picking years that we can always go back to 1654 in this case and all of those things but first I thought for a moment we could talk about just kind of the media reaction in the general reaction related to Tucker doing this in the first place.
Carol, you are an actual journalist.
I didn't have to use air quotes there.
It was very refreshing.
Are you somewhat shocked at the reaction to Tucker doing this, even before the clips had been released?
I mean, basically everyone's saying he's now just a Russian stooge and all that kind of stuff.
I was struck by, I couldn't, maybe Carol can comment on this, when Tucker asked him, have you reached out to Viktor Orban and advised him, obviously he was using his beautiful, sarcastic delivery, and it seemed, so I'm not sure if, you know, Putin was being manipulative by pretending that he didn't get the sarcasm or whether it really flew over his head.
I just thought that that was such a beautiful moment because in looking at it, it seems as though he didn't get the sarcasm because he answered, Oh no, I haven't yet spoken to, I've never spoken to Viktor Orban about it.
But regarding this idea of whom we should speak to or not, and since we're talking about Tucker, I've had a, A cousin with whom I went through the Lebanese Civil War, so we've had very intense moments together, disowned me publicly on Twitter because I had appeared on Tucker's show.
So this not only happens apocalyptically amongst people who say, how can you speak to Tucker?
How could you speak to Putin?
It even happens with family members.
So it's an ugly reflex and of course I condemn it.
Yeah, for a moment, let's just discuss the specifics of that clip.
This idea that we can pick, you know, years to go back to and, you know, territories that were here and borders that were drawn this way on that map and all that.
To me, that puts us in just like a very dangerous position where how do we ever pick what year zero is?
Well, yeah, that's definitely a concern to me, especially as the years he's talking about predate the American Revolution.
If we're getting into the 1600s, we're in trouble as a country about returning to borders.
When I heard that clip, it also did sound to me very like land acknowledgement, you know, lefty college kids, which is what Putin is praised to be this like anti-woke, anti-leftist.
He's sort of parodying the same line of he says the words like indigenous like rights and stuff.
Um, he sounds like any anybody on a college campus.
So in Arabia, why don't we go back to when, you know, Muhammad eradicated those Jewish tribes in Arabia, and they literally have the right to those lands as indigenous folks from that land.
And so you're exactly right, Dave, this forensic accounting of who owned what, when, It's also called history.
And so if you had to go back and retrace all the borders, you'd be spending a long time doing it.
So yeah, it's a silly exercise and we need to move faster.
We have three clips for you, but I want to throw to another clip because I thought this was the most interesting about when a negotiated settlement could have appeared and sort of now how deep we're in something that nobody seems to see a way out of.
Dad, I thought that was a particularly clever move by Putin right there to answer the question by saying, hey, you Americans, you have a bunch of problems as we're all watching what's happening with our border and the economy and debt and all of those things.
And especially when you're sitting across from Tucker to say that, knowing that Tucker's base feels that, that's what sort of fueled the rise of Tucker and Trump to another extent.
So Putin really knows what he's doing here.
Also, I think in this case, and one of you can correct me if I'm wrong, I think he is telling the truth that there was Yeah, right.
I think that was a really sharp point by him, especially talking to Tucker.
He prepared very well for this.
Look, he threw out a point that Tucker had tried to join the CIA.
I mean, he knew things.
And so I think that he did well on some things, but ultimately I thought he came off like not everybody's like, oh, he's came off as a brilliant strategist.
I don't know.
He came off as sort of erratic to me.
And I, I don't know about that deal in Istanbul, which is, you know, made me think about that too.
I don't know what was in that deal.
I think three of us are pretty involved and pretty big media consumers.
But can any of you say what was in that deal?
I really don't know.
He also he blames Britain for not pursuing it.
He doesn't he kind of lays off America, actually.
He doesn't say that it was the US who stood in the way.
He says Boris Johnson.
I don't know.
I feel like he was trying to be too slick and too smart and some of it really didn't come off to me.
If he was trying to talk, I forget who said this on Twitter yesterday, but if he was trying to talk to the American Heartland, his extensive history lesson just made no sense.
It was too much and it was too detailed and I just didn't get it.
Yeah, I want to throw one other clip, because I think this really was Tucker's best moment.
And yeah, Putin did poke him at one point, basically saying, you tried to get in the FBI, it didn't work out.
It's kind of a kind of a funny moment.
And to Tucker's credit, they did not edit that out.
And I hope that Tucker, when he gets back here, will explain a little bit more about what his process was like, whether there was anything agreed to beforehand, etc, etc.
But I think this was really the best moment, because there is a Wall Street journalist A Wall Street Journal journalist who is in jail in Russia right now, 32 years old, and Tucker pressed Putin on releasing him.
I'm just going to ask you one last question, and that's about Evan Gershkovitz, who's the Wall Street Journal reporter.
He's 32, and he's been in prison for almost a year.
And I just want to ask you directly if, as a sign of your decency, you would be willing to release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States.
I thought that was a really nice moment by Tucker.
You know, and it's an interesting distinction between someone being a journalist and the way we treat journalists in America, actually not too great these days, but compared to how someone in Russia might treat a journalist who gets secret information and then Putin's like, well, he's no longer a journalist.
Oh, he's got a lot of testicular fortitude right there.
I mean, I don't, I can't imagine that, uh, you know, he could do any faux pas that would land Tucker in prison.
So I don't think there's any real concrete consequences to him being bold, but I think it still takes a lot of courage to be able to look this guy in the face and kind of, uh, you know, push him on these points.
I also was concerned about the motherland comment because obviously his background, Evett's background is, I think he was born in Russia.
And so it's a little concerning for other Russian-born people to wonder which motherland Putin might have been talking about.
That was the best moment of the interview.
I thought that that was very well done.
I like that very much that Tucker asked him that.
I was hoping he would bring him up.
And I think it challenged a lot of people who, you know, would say that Tucker came there just to give Putin, you know, sort of a A pedestal interview.
There were some tense moments and that was one of them and it was a really good one.
Let me just ask you guys one other thing on this and then we'll move on, which is that to me it seems that, I get why the media doesn't like Tucker, I get why the media doesn't like Putin and all of those things, but it's like if they would just basically do anything close to their job, then people wouldn't be that interested in this.
And there's just, Gad, is there anything left with mainstream media at this point?
Do you turn on anything on mainstream media and think you're getting anything remotely close to the truth?
As a matter of fact, when Tucker, I hate to say this because I still once in a while appear on Fox, when Tucker left Fox, I've almost stopped watching Fox.
It's been many, many years since I've watched any of the other networks.
And so, yeah, much of my media consumption comes from these quote alternative
sources.
It is certainly dying.
And it's so, I actually, I have an article that came out today in National Post
where I talk about journalistic integrity and what a hit that deontological principle has taken.
If I could just defend Fox for just like one second, I think Fox has been fantastic on Israel,
on the war, on the news side, not just like, you know, being pro-Israel.
They've been reporting some really in-depth, interesting stuff.
I don't watch a lot of TV, to be totally honest, but every time I do catch Fox, I see that they're doing a much deeper dive into what's going on in Israel than I think most people would imagine.
Yeah, look, I don't have cable and haven't had cable for probably a decade, but I will say that every time I go on Fox, and I go on multiple times a week, I've never taken a dime from them.
I do it for my own, because I wanna get my voice out there.
Nobody ever tells me what to say.
You know, in the early days of going on there, you guys know this, when you go on cable news shows, they ask you, oh, give us a recap of what you think about these things.
They haven't done that to me in years.
I go on all these shows and say whatever I want.
I always do it live.
So to that end, I think it is probably significantly different than CNN or MSNBC, which I suspect none of the three of us have been on.
They released some of the interview or the text The analysis of their interview with Joe Biden, and check this out.
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse.
He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of his interview when his term ended.
If it was 2013, when did I stop being vice president?
And forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began in 2009.
Am I still a vice president?
He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Bo died, and his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.
Among other things, he mistakenly said he had a real difference of opinion with General Carl Eikenberry, when in fact Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
So basically, this comes out yesterday, and then it was so bad, talking about his memory, which we all know, but they keep running cover for on mainstream media, that at 7.30 last night, they put Joe Biden out in the White House.
We have about a 60-second compilation.
There's three key parts here, and it's just a disaster.
I know there's some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events.
There's even reference that I don't remember when my son died.
How in the hell dare he raise that?
Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn't any of their damn business.
Let me tell you something.
Some of you have commented, I wear, since the day he died, every single day, the rosary he got from Our Lady of Every Memorial Day we hold a service remembering him, attending by friends and family and the people who loved him.
I don't need anyone.
I don't need anyone to remind me when he passed away or passed away.
President Biden, something the special counsel said in his report is that one of the reasons you were not charged is because, in his description, you are a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.
So there are two tragedies, of course, seeing the cognitive demise of the President of the United States, but I'd like to add a second point.
I was recently on a show with a host, the host was a British psychiatrist, and he asked me that in your 30-year career as a professor and behavioral scientist, what is the singular finding that has most surprised you.
And so I thought for a second, I said, the inability of people to change their mind, despite a tsunami of evidence that should get them to change their mind.
Now, why am I saying this?
Because any honest person, any decent person, even if they are Democrats, would say, yes, I concede that Joe Biden, you know, doesn't have much cognitive acuity left in him.
And yet, if you remember recently, Bill Maher had Patrick Bette David on his show, and Bill Maher said, well, no, when it comes to who is more cognitively aware and who has better cognition, well, it's Biden, to which, if you remember, Patrick Bette David just kind of used the Socratic method and just said, really?
Do you really think that?
So here's Bill Maher, which we all can presume is an intelligent person, Who doesn't have the intellectual honesty and decency to say, yes, I'm a Democrat and I support the Democratic Party, but, you know, I am going to believe my lying eyes.
And I think that's the real tragedy, which is that when I go online to try to engage people, to at least get them to concede that he has cognitive decline, a great majority won't concede that.
Well, I'm glad that you reminded your viewers that I'm Canadian because...
You know, at least when you have cognitive decline, as Joe Biden has, that implies that you have a brain, whereas our Canadian Prime Minister could never have cognitive decline because it's an empty cranium.
So you're way ahead of us, because at least there is still some semblance of a functioning brain in Joe Biden.
So consider yourself lucky that you're not Canadian.
Again, you know, the question has been, how do the Democrats get rid of Joe Biden, but not end up with Kamala as their nominee?
And I think it's too late to bypass that.
If they wanted to do that, they should have started earlier.
And I think, look, if we're thinking about it and talking about it, I'm sure that powerful Democrats behind the scenes were doing the same.
So why didn't they do this earlier?
And I think the answer comes down to Biden remains their best shot at winning this election.
Crazy as that may be, Biden's the name you know.
Biden's the man you know.
He's not going to be some, you know, Gavin Newsom pretending that San Francisco is totally OK and that California is doing super great and, you know, kind of take a chance on him.
Biden is a known entity to these people.
I think he's going to be tougher to beat than people think.
And I think that the idea that, oh, they're going to just swap in Michelle Obama at the convention, I just don't see it.
I think that they're going to have a gigantic civil war.
They're already having a giant issue in the Democratic Party because of Israel.
Dissonance Between Reparations and Slavery Ideology00:09:40
Yeah, I just, to me, it's like give the devil his due.
It would not surprise me if it was the Democrats who gave the boot to the first black female vice president from becoming the president.
It just wouldn't surprise me.
But let's move on from this week in dementia to this week in crazy racist people.
I want to finish the show with two stories that are just Perfect examples of how out of control the progressive movement has gotten in America.
So Sunny Hostin, who I think is truly the nastiest woman on television, and a genuine racist, and not that bright, despite her law degree and everything else.
She found out a little bit, you know these TV shows where they tell you a little bit about your family history and your ancestry?
She found out some stuff about her ancestors that, well, take a look.
Well, in a sense, let's link it back to the earlier conversation on the forensic accounting of who owns which land.
And you can't move forward in life by always looking back.
In the exact same way, It seems amazing to me that she could feel either relief that she doesn't have slave owners or hurt that her past does have slave owners, because that presumes that there is intergenerational guilt that is passed on, which is such a grotesque idea.
So in a sane world, it would simply not matter in the least bit one way or the other what her genealogy was.
But when you play the identity politics game, then of course it becomes a jarring reality.
So the idea that she got caught up in her own thing, All right, so she goes on this show, she finds out this horrific information about her past, it's just soul-crushing that not everyone related to her in the past was a wonderful person apparently, but now she goes on The View and watch how she still puts ideology over everything.
I don't know how you felt when you did it, Whoopi, but I was really reluctant to do it because I just sensed that there could be something in my family history that would be disappointing.
Negative.
Negative, yes.
I thought I was gonna have that kind of moment and Skip had asked me to do it for a long time and I finally decided to do it because I thought it'd be helpful for my children.
And my children's children, to know what their real history was, you know?
So the family business, I have been told that they were printers and journalists, but they were, in fact, enslavers.
And my mother... Oh, I just fell over the audience.
It was deeply disappointing.
unidentified
Honey, how does this change you, though?
You mentioned your mom was upset, and this was shocking, and maybe deep down, you kind of resisted it.
How has this changed you, knowing what you're hearing now?
I still believe in reparations, by the way, so y'all can stop texting me and emailing me and saying that I'm a white girl and that I don't deserve reparations.
unidentified
I don't know who sent her a thing telling her she was a white girl.
And, you know, some part of me is like, wow, Jews are white now.
Look at us go, you know?
We were always white.
And I smoked Newports when I was a teenager, so I did always feel a little Puerto Rican.
And I relate to what she's going through over there.
It's hard to find out you're not actually Puerto Rican and your ancestors might be enslavers.
But look, if she wants reparations, I think that she should lead the way because the descendants of enslavers owe more to the descendants of slaves than those of us who came here in the 70s do.
Dad, before I get on to the final clip, when you've been asked this question and you talk about this disconnect between people being given new information and still being unable to change the ideology, do you have the trick to get them out of that?
Because I get that question a lot.
I mean, people, everyone watching this show has somebody in their family that is on, you know, let's say that side of the issues and they try to wake them up, but they can't figure out the toolkit to do it.
So I do actually in in chapter 7 of the parasitic mind I do talk about how to seek truth But that is predicated on the principle that the my interlocutor is going to be honest enough to not go la la la I don't want to hear it So as long as you are honest enough to at least allow me to lay out the evidence I think I could flip you the problem is that many of the people that I interact with are of the la la la type and Unfortunately, they are unreachable This is why they go for the kids, by the way, because kids aren't going to go la la la la la.
So if Sonny Hostin, the descendant of slave owners, asking for reparations on The View where she gets millions of dollars to spout that nonsense, if that was not enough for you in the week of sort of progressive racist lunacy, we have one more clip for you.
She's maybe been using some tax dollars for things she shouldn't have.
And listen to her explanation of kind of why she did it and how we should all treat her.
unidentified
Y'all should be ashamed of y'allself.
Y'all black.
Y'all are black.
And y'all sitting up here beating and attacking on a black woman that's in power.
Y'all should be ashamed of yourselves.
Dalton's difficulties got worse in recent weeks.
With water main breaks, Henyard blames on trustee budget cuts.
Then four people were shot and injured last week, leaving nerves frayed and Henyard's opponents pointing out her sizable security detail.
It's unfortunate that politics are being played.
But what has happened is a million dollars out of my budget has been cut because of politics.
Y'all forget I am the leader.
They want to hear from the mayor.
If y'all ain't learned that yet, the mayor, not the trustees that don't do nothing, that only run they mouth.
Y'all don't do no work, no work.
Tiffany Henyard considers herself something of a crusader, but one who's clearly annoyed by questions from a rebellious group of Dalton trustees who are in a standoff with her overspending.
At the end of the day, vendors are not being paid.
Board approved it.
The vendors are not being paid.
How about you be a good leader, bring RFPs to the forefront, so not just us, but the residents and everybody else in America know how the money is being spent.
WGN investigates has cataloged tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars spent on trips, meals, and more by Tiffany Henyard and her allies in Dalton and on the Thornton Township Board, where she's the supervisor.
Township credit card records show Henyard and other officials spent more than $67,000 on trips to Portland, Austin, Atlanta, and New York City.
Many of the flights were first class.
So were the accommodations in Atlanta, Henyard and her team stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel, costing taxpayers more than $9,000.
In New York, the bill came to $13,000.
Henyard has refused to explain the specific purpose of the trips.
Mayor Henyard and other top officials traveled to Sin City in May to attend a shopping center conference.
It's unclear if it helped Dalton land any deals.
Don't have a clue.
We're all in the dark.
Not only are the residents in the dark, but the trustees are also in the dark as well.
I do not handle anything as relates to WIC credit cards.
As you heard me speak today in my board meeting, I do not handle that.
Some of those charges are for you, though.
No, sir.
You didn't go to Las Vegas?
Mmm... What is that?
No comment.
You don't know if you were in Las Vegas?
Of course I do.
Were you?
It's not paid by them.
Did you fly first class to Las Vegas?
Any other questions?
Actually, yes.
The credit card records do shed some light on tax dollars spent at several restaurants near the Strip, including Cafe Hollywood and Hot and Juicy Crawfish.
Alright, any other questions?
So you're not going to answer how taxpayer dollars are being spent?
How about before we get into the million dollars that the police doesn't have and all the vendors that aren't being paid and everything else, Gad, you're a master of communication and trying to help people know themselves a little bit better and live a better life.
Her demeanor, her general demeanor when speaking, first off, the way she just talked to the reporter there at the end, like, just, I'm a liar, you know I'm a liar.
And then the way she's berating the people at the beginning, like, She's gonna replace Biden, basically, is what I'm saying, right?
But I'd like to draw an analogy between this progressive calculus, you can't criticize me, I'm a black woman in power, and compare that progressive calculus to Sharia Islamic law.
And under Sharia law, The punishment for a crime depends on the identity of the perpetrator and the victim.
So if a Jewish man kills a Muslim man, it's not the same penalty as if it were reversed, right?
Justice is not blind under Sharia law.
It's the exact same principle that happens under progressive calculus, right?
Because it says whether you can judge whether I've committed an ethical breach Or whether I am a good president of Harvard University or any other metric of a meritocracy depends on certain immutable characteristics.
So progressive calculus is literally akin to Sharia law, and one has to think whether this is something that we want to codify within our society.
I don't think I've ever even stayed at a Four Seasons.
Not bad, although she was only at the Marriott in New York City.
That makes you wonder.
Let me ask you guys one other thing before I let you go.
I am sensing that we are getting some wins here, and I know it's a constant, you get a little and you lose a little and all that, but something does feel like it's shifted where people aren't afraid of the woke the way they were.
Even if we were to connect this to the Biden story, people are starting to talk about the truth a little bit more.
I think we've probably reached the sort of apex, zenith point of wokeness.
Now, that doesn't mean that the battle is not going to still be bloody in a metaphorical sense.
I think these ideas took 30, 40, 50 years to proliferate throughout society, and it hopefully won't take as long to eradicate them, but it's not going to go away by next Tuesday.
It's going to be tough to be positive, but I agree with you that wokeness is waning.
I think that the pendulum has, you know, swung the other way.
But like I said earlier in the show, the big problem is that they've captured all of our institutions and they're targeting this message to children.
And that's really where our battle should be right now, especially in the K through 12 space.
You know, the college kids are sort of lost and we need to forget about them.
But the K through 12 is where a sane person needs to focus their energy And you're too modest to mention your own book, so let me do it for you as you cover in your book, Stolen Youth.
are a rapt audience and they know that they can target them.