Feb. 16, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| All right, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and it is Friday, which means it's time for another roundtable extravaganza. | ||
| Joining me today is the founder of New Discourses, James Lindsay, and the senior editor-at-large for Newsweek, host of The Josh Hammer Show, and host of the new show, America on Trial, Josh Hammer. | ||
| Guys, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It's a pleasure, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Josh, you're getting another show? | ||
| I mean, who's out there going, we need more Josh Hammer. | ||
| What's the deal here with this other show? | ||
| Yeah, apparently some right-wing nut jobs, right? | ||
| So we actually launched this show, Dave, on January 29th. | ||
| So we're finishing our third week here. | ||
| So it's a brand new daily podcast. | ||
| We're covering the 2024 election from a strictly legal perspective. | ||
| So, you know, quick bite-sized 15, 20 minute episodes every day about what's going on in Georgia, what's going on with Jack Smith, what's going on with Hunter Biden, the prodigal son, when it comes to the gun and tax prosecution. | ||
| And all the fun stuff that, you know, we're getting into the legal nitty-gritty a little bit more than you might find in most of your daily talk shows. | ||
| As a daily talk show guy, I do mostly who's the most racist person of the day, so that's a nice take. | ||
| I won't consider you competition. | ||
| Anyway, of course, we're gonna be talking about all the woke stuff of the week. | ||
| We're gonna be doing a little bit on Christian nationalism because there's been an interesting conversation bubbling up online that both of you, particularly you, James, have been very much involved in. | ||
| And then we have an elderly man with dementia who's trying to become president again. | ||
| We got another old guy trying to replace him, who was president once, and a whole bunch more. | ||
| But let's just start with some general insanity, because I saw this clip earlier in the week. | ||
| We just could not fit it into our daily show. | ||
| You'll learn what that's like, Josh, when you have too much stuff to cover on a daily show. | ||
| But this is Jamal Bowman. | ||
| Jamal Bowman, the guy who should be in jail because he pulled a fire alarm at the Capitol. | ||
| But he's a Democrat, so he has Democrat privilege, which means you can do whatever the hell you want. | ||
| Here he is explaining that he is unleashing a hip-hop task force on America. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hip-hop is not just music. | |
| It's not just an art form. | ||
| It's a culture with a multi-billion dollar economy, but we haven't harnessed the power of it yet to make transformative change in legislation. | ||
| The Black Music Action Coalition is an advocacy organization that's committed to utilizing the cultural capital of Black music to influence the music industry and greater society on the issues of racial justice and equity through policy, philanthropic, and educational initiatives. | ||
| What you are watching is the maturation of the culture. | ||
| You are watching us come together and take something that came from nothing, that came out of despair, that came out of being disenfranchised, right? | ||
| It came out of a political system that used us, but we didn't use. | ||
| Now you're seeing the effects of that culture growing up. | ||
| All right, James, Josh is the legal expert. | ||
| I feel like you're the race expert here, and I know there were a couple buzzwords that you love there. | ||
| Racial justice, equity. | ||
| What do you make of this hip hop movement that's gonna, I guess, solve racism, which I'm pretty sure we solved in 1997 until they brought it back. | ||
| Yeah, well, you would be surprised. | ||
| My favorite buzzword that he used was cultural capital. | ||
| They are going to seize the cultural capital in order to direct it to an agenda, a political agenda, in fact, a transformative agenda. | ||
| Here's a fun little side fact, by the way. | ||
| I've been researching Mao from China, the CCP, the whole thing. | ||
| Did you know that he had a program That he called Ideological remolding, but one of the translations for that is ideological transformation And so what they're going to do is they're going to or what they are doing with this hip-hop thing is they are Tapping into a huge reservoir a billion dollar industry of cultural capital that targets a particular population And they're going to bend it toward ideological transformation. | ||
| They're going to use it as a political tool so they are colonizing hip-hop and And turning it into a democratic political apparatus, or really probably a neo-Marxist political apparatus, to push things. | ||
| We know it's neo-Marxist because of the racial equity, racial justice lines. | ||
| Those are neo-Marxist watchwords. | ||
| And so we know that what they're doing is colonizing or co-opting a subculture in the United States in order to turn it to their political advantage. | ||
| They want to seize that cultural capital and use it for transforming society. | ||
| Oh, everything is trans these days, isn't it? | ||
| Josh, hip-hop is not my thing. | ||
| I suspect it's not your thing, although maybe you'll surprise us in just a second with a little diddly. | ||
| But the fact that they're still saying some of the words that James just mentioned again, racial justice, equity, transformative society, it seems like we're finally, in many ways, getting on the other side of woke. | ||
| More and more people are waking up, and yet here they are once again pushing Equity over equality and a whole bunch of ideas that we know when they come out of this thing will make America worse. | ||
| Yeah, they just love the buzzwords, right? | ||
| And unfortunately, Dave, when you're dealing with people like this, and by the way, sorry to disappoint you, but yeah, your instincts are correct. | ||
| I'm not a big hip-hop guy. | ||
| I typically listen to country music in my car, which is probably the least surprising thing in the world. | ||
| May Toby Keith's memory be a blessing, by the way. | ||
| But anyway, going back to our conversation here, it reminds me, Dave, I was speaking out in St. | ||
| Louis in November. | ||
| I was doing a couple of federal society events at a couple of local law schools out there, and I was speaking to SLU, St. | ||
| Lewis University and the talk that I was giving there was on the lie of so-called systemic | ||
| racism. | ||
| And I kind of just went through the history of the United States, I mean, starting with | ||
| the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident, going up through | ||
| the Civil War and the promise of Abraham Lincoln and then the three Reconstruction Amendments, | ||
| the 13th through 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Martin Luther King, all | ||
| in all of that. | ||
| And my basic argument is that quote-unquote systemic racism, as that term is used, actually died in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| And maybe you could say the Voting Rights Act one year later, whatever. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| So the point is this actually died as a legal matter a very long time ago. | ||
| And the questions that I got from the students They were just acting like I hadn't been talking for the past half hour before I opened it up to Q&A. | ||
| It was like, well, what about this anecdotal thing at this hospital? | ||
| What about this bizarrely anecdotal thing in this HR department? | ||
| So I find these people, Dave, are typically just so impervious to reason. | ||
| And unfortunately, it's very difficult to try to have a civil conversation. | ||
| But the good news, the silver lining is that when I think it comes to the fundamental equality versus equity debate, Which apparently we're still fighting. | ||
| I actually think that our side is winning. | ||
| I actually think that the side of civilizational sanity is prevailing on this debate. | ||
| Thanks to folks like you, James. | ||
| I would like to thank myself. | ||
| I think that we're actually prevailing. | ||
| We have a long way to go, but we're doing good work, I think. | ||
| Well, James, is that part of the point of them putting this out there, that there do seem to be some wins, let's say, on the non-woke side as it pertains to the black community, people waking up and saying, oh, actually, affirmative action hasn't been good for us in generational poverty and all of these things. | ||
| And this is just like another one of those, as they start leaving the plantation, as they say, they just suck you back in with equity. | ||
| Well, I mean, that and appealing to listen to the verbiage that you heard from from the speaker. | ||
| He said, you know, it was it's a it's a culture that they are. | ||
| It's a politics. | ||
| He said that that was. | ||
| Something built by them, but not used by them. | ||
| Born of nothing, I think he said. | ||
| Yeah, born of nothing. | ||
| We built this thing out of nothing. | ||
| It was exploited. | ||
| We were exploited. | ||
| You were alienated from your own culture, and now it's time to turn hip-hop into a democratic political machine, which is in fact alienating people from their own culture. | ||
| A counterculture is certainly not like a democratic machine. | ||
| But yeah, I think you're exactly right. | ||
| The woke brand across the board is losing A lot of it's social cash. | ||
| People are sick of it. | ||
| People are tired of it. | ||
| People are actually kind of turning against it. | ||
| They're seeing through it. | ||
| And by trying to tap into pop culture, they're trying to get into the aspect of cool. | ||
| I don't know if you ever saw the old documentary about MTV that was called Merchants of Cool. | ||
| Where it's like all these corporate people and government people try to figure out what's cool and package it up and sell it to kids it's the same thing that they're doing in the goal is literally to take a piece of. | ||
| Something that skews particularly toward black culture and turn it into a political weapon to keep them voting for the same kinds of politics that have actually been the problem for them primarily since the Civil Rights Act of the Voting Rights Act since actually since the Declaration of the Great Society by Johnson. | ||
| So I want to give you guys another example of how wokeness and really equity over equality destroys everything, because it literally destroys math and basic economics as we have known them to be. | ||
| So this is an incredible video. | ||
| This is California Senate candidate. | ||
| She is a progressive. | ||
| Surprise, surprise. | ||
| Barbara Lee. | ||
| And she doesn't think 15 is enough for minimum wage. | ||
| Not 25, not 30, not 35, not 40. | ||
| Let her tell you for herself. | ||
|
unidentified
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First, let me say, I owned and ran a small business for 11 years. | |
| federal minimum wage. That's seven times the current national minimum wage of | ||
| $7.25 an hour. Can you explain how that would be economically sustainable for | ||
| small businesses? You have 60 seconds. First, let me say I owned and ran a | ||
| small business for 11 years. I created hundreds of jobs, benefits, | ||
| retirement benefits, also health care benefits. | ||
| I know what worker productivity means, and that means that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of and have a living wage. | ||
| In the Bay Area, I believe it was the United Way, came out with a report that very recently, $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by. | ||
| Another survey very recently, 104,000 for a family of one. | ||
| Barely enough to get by. | ||
| Low income because of the affordability crisis. | ||
| And so just do the math. | ||
| Just do the math. | ||
| Of course we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage. | ||
| You talk about $20, $25, fine. | ||
| But I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate I mean, there's so much there that I don't even know where to begin. | ||
| She knows what worker productivity means, but then she doesn't explain what worker productivity is. | ||
| She explains something else altogether. | ||
| Josh, I'm a simple man, so help me with this, and I don't have my calculator in front of me. | ||
| I'm starting to think that if you just artificially raise the wages that you pay people, that ultimately other people will have to figure out how to make up for those expenses, and the cost of goods and services will rise. | ||
| Am I some sort of crazy capitalist? | ||
| Very confused, maybe? | ||
| No, you're not confused at all. | ||
| And you know, worse than that, many people will be fired. | ||
| I mean, here's the grand irony of the whole minimum wage debate. | ||
| The idea of the minimum wage first came to prominence About a hundred years ago, it first came to prominence in the late 19-teens, really in the 1920s. | ||
| And here's the kicker, Dave. | ||
| The people who were first introducing the minimum wage as an economic policy in the workplace were of the Margaret Sanger eugenicist, anti-black, racist variety. | ||
| It was literally initially imposed as a means to subtly or not so subtly as the case may be Try to get black employees out of the workplace. | ||
| This is happening all throughout the Jim Crow South. | ||
| That was literally the original impetus for minimum wage legislation. | ||
| Now, look, I mean, personally, I mean, I am not necessarily of the school of thought that what is the most economically efficient thing here, there, and everywhere has to be the exact policy of the land. | ||
| So, for example, the most economically efficient minimum wage day would be zero dollars. | ||
| I don't think it's crazy to actually tie the minimum wage At least to inflation. | ||
| To me, that strike to me is not necessarily crazy. | ||
| But the idea that's $50, $50. | ||
| Are you out of your mind? | ||
| I mean, does she have any idea what the drop in employment the very next day after this policy went into place? | ||
| I mean, she probably doesn't because she's never read an economics textbook there. | ||
| But you just have to be so clueless. | ||
| And unfortunately, when it comes to Democratic Party politics, you saw what's happening there in the primary, running against crazy people like Adam Schiff, the Russiagate hoaxer. | ||
| I mean, when you're running in this kind of a primary, in this kind of a far-left district out in California, your former state, Dave, as you very well know, you have to just sound as crazy as possible, and that's what Barbara Lee is doing here. | ||
| Right, so James, is that really what this is all about, that because these people are so disconnected from reality, that there is no number high enough, there is no policy crazy enough, like, okay, fine, 50, why not 75, why not 150, why should anyone make any money, like, virtually Any logical explanation around how the society has operated or could function is counter to everything they believe in. | ||
| Well, they're not real big on society functioning, so that's true. | ||
| And your logic is right. | ||
| If 50, why not 75? | ||
| If 75, why not 150? | ||
| If 150, why not a million? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| There'd just not be money. | ||
| And of course, the economics would begin to dictate that over time. | ||
| Your analysis, when you spoke to Josh a moment ago, is absolutely right. | ||
| You're just going to inflate the cost of everything. | ||
| And so you're like kind of a dog chasing its own tail, or maybe I should say a snake eating its own tail in this case, not getting anywhere. | ||
| But the mentality that they're using is incredibly seductive. | ||
| And that's what's key to focus on here, which is there's a they out there with lots of money that they don't want you to have. | ||
| And so what we're going to do is just throw money at the problem in an artificial way, because that's the real source of the problem. | ||
| The real problem is that they have money and they don't want you to have it. | ||
| So there's an us and there's a they, and it's an Incredibly important for the us to think of ourselves as a class as an us as a revolutionary public political force in history to demand that they redistribute what they're keeping from us on some illegitimate terms and that's the seductive message is not that you that it's hard to earn a living or that there are these other problems it's that the real source of the problem is that there are people getting rich. | ||
| keeping you out of your inheritance or your opportunity and that you have to turn against them. | ||
| So it's intrinsically divisive as well. | ||
| Right, and that's of course what equity really is all about. | ||
| It's not lifting everybody up. | ||
| It's actually chopping some people down and then we can all be kind of down here. | ||
| But Josh, do you think they even realize, I mean I guess I know the answer to this, but do you think they realize to some extent that all they're doing is exacerbating or shortening the timeline to when All of the jobs that she's talking about will be replaced by robots. | ||
| I mean, it's already happening at McDonald's. | ||
| It's happening in our fields. | ||
| I assume I will be replaced on this show by a robot soon enough. | ||
| Like, there's nothing that we can do to stop this thing. | ||
| But if you keep adding costs on the human side, it'll just happen that much faster. | ||
| Well, Dave, let me tell you that you, sir, are irreplaceable. | ||
| So I don't think that you're going to be replaced by an AI bot anytime soon. | ||
| I mean, we'll see what Elon Musk has to say about it. | ||
| I mean, he might have a trick up his sleeve or two. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm sure she has some advisor who probably has said something along those lines to her. | ||
| I mean, maybe a donor who has a small business, who understands basic microeconomics 101. | ||
| Has said in an email, hey, you might want to rethink this policy. | ||
| I think the key point, Dave, is that she just doesn't care. | ||
| I mean, she's not trying to do anything that would be remotely resembling the pursuit of good policy, of economically sound policy, of trying to pursue justice or the common good or any of these things. | ||
| that politicians, statesmen, in their proper grounding of what it means to be statesmen, | ||
| what they ought to do. That's not what she's doing. She's literally running as far left as | ||
| possible to get elected in the Democratic Party primary in what is the most iconic, biggest, | ||
| bluest, wealthiest state in the country, which is California. That is exactly what's going on here. | ||
| I'm sure when the conversation in this debate turned from economics to immigration, | ||
| I'm sure they were trying to outdo themselves as well. | ||
| Who can let in the most illegal aliens? | ||
| Heck, let's let in half of China. | ||
| Let's let in half of India. | ||
| Who knows where it stops, right? | ||
| I'm sure issue by issue that's what's going on here because we are just so divorced again from the pursuit of good policy, let alone the pursuit of truth. | ||
| It's all about who can say the most outlandish things to get the most far-left grassroots progressive support. | ||
| Bernie Sanders style, I think that's really what's going on here. | ||
| So I want to shift to something that doesn't quite seem like it's related to all this, but actually is, because the further bananas the left goes, they start creating a reaction on the right. | ||
| And there's been a conversation bubbling up online that's just now starting to seep into the mainstream that, James, you've been talking about for quite some time, which is the rise of Christian nationalism. | ||
| And you can feel that this thing is about to burn very hot. | ||
| Because Rob Reiner is doing a documentary. | ||
| Rob Reiner, who is a far leftist, progressive, big Biden guy, meathead from All in the Family back in the day, is doing a documentary about it. | ||
| We're gonna show you, it's about a minute 45 clip. | ||
|
unidentified
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America and Christianity are like baseball and apple pie, and we celebrate them together. | |
| I was 16, 17 years old when I became a Christian. | ||
| I'm an evangelical minister. | ||
| I've been a Christian my whole life. | ||
| I'm a Christian nationalist. | ||
| I have nothing to be ashamed of because that's what most Americans are. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is Christian Nationalism Christian? | |
| Um, no, it isn't. | ||
| We should be blazing forth as a countercultural example. | ||
| And instead, we're leading the charge of malice and division. | ||
| Christian nationalism uses Christianity as a means to an end. | ||
| That end being some form of authoritarianism. | ||
| Being a Christian is about the values of inclusion. | ||
| Christian nationalism is certainly not based on the values of the gospel. | ||
| God wants America to be saved. | ||
| They're told over and over and over again that you're in danger. | ||
| You need to fight if you don't want to lose your country. | ||
| We are in a civil war between good and evil. | ||
| This is not a movement about Christian values. | ||
| This is about Christian power. | ||
|
unidentified
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What happens to the people who don't believe this stuff? | |
| We are on the precipice. | ||
| God is on our side! | ||
| We're taking our nation back! | ||
| The thing that keeps me up at night is that we lose democracy. | ||
| Does that seem possible? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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[crowd cheering] | |
| Christianity at its best is committed to love and truth and justice. | ||
| If we do this right, what a country we will be. | ||
| All right, so that doc is coming out soon again. | ||
| Rob Reiner is a self-avowed progressive lefty. | ||
| I mean, I think he would say he has Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| You can see he's connecting a lot of things related to religion, to politics, and everything else. | ||
| James, you've been talking about Christian nationalism for quite some time, which is why I wanted to hit this on the show today. | ||
| I'll just let you go from there, from that trailer. | ||
| Yeah, I'll try to be brief because the thing that I keep saying on Twitter to get attention is that, oh God, I'm supposed to call it X, to get attention is that Christian nationalism is 10,000% in ops. | ||
| It's supposed to be called X, so it's 10,000% in ops, by which I mean an active measure that's being enacted by our government and by agents within that government. | ||
| In order to ensnare Christians to achieve certain ends. | ||
| I think it has a multitude of ends. | ||
| I've been studying, it turns out I'm involved in a documentary that's coming out probably this summer called Beneath Sheep's Clothing that looks at the Soviet Union and how Soviet Union established what was called a registered church and actually overthrew Christianity that wasn't run by the Soviet government. | ||
| Uh, and the techniques are very similar to what I see with this kind of rising Christian nationalism. | ||
| They're putting out narratives. | ||
| That's called operational preparation of the environment. | ||
| The Christian nationalism is tied to domestic violence that is tied to racism that is tied to neo confederacy that it that it's tied to, um. | ||
| Political violence very explicitly. | ||
| I did a thread on the X yesterday They actually detailed something like 20 different articles and there's just a tiny tip of the iceberg of how many articles there are making these kinds of cases out there if you search the words Christian nationalism and say extremism and The goals I think are one to scare center-left voters into thinking there's this gigantic monster out there that's going to take over and destroy the country and force them all to live in a theocracy and Just get them to vote against MAGA, basically. | ||
| They're tying Trump directly into this. | ||
| They're tying MAGA directly into this. | ||
| But the main thing that they're doing is tying it not just to resistance against COVID, but as you saw in Reiner's clip there, featuring the one and only David French, and also a name you probably never had mentioned on your show, Russell Moore, that every evangelical is going to recognize. | ||
| What the heck's that guy doing here in a Rob Reiner documentary? | ||
| What's going on there is they're tying it to January 6th and insurrection. | ||
| They want the idea that independent Christianity is a hotbed of domestic extremism so that they can get around 1A, create a registered church like in the USSR, in addition to scaring center-left voters. | ||
| What that would look like is that they put various pressures within the context of 1A, FBI agents sitting in churches, writing reports, tax, you know, using the IRS to leverage the church, in different ways if it's independent, but if they get on | ||
| board with one of these captured conventions like the one that Russell Moore is a part of, for example, | ||
| then they can get a pass. So there creates a pressure pump for churches to join conventions, no independent | ||
| Christianity, no independent belief any longer, and what you end up with is a 1A compliant registered | ||
| church like the Soviet Union allowed it. | ||
| The Soviet Union didn't crush Christianity, it crushed independent Christianity, it crushed religious liberty, and it did propagandist Christianity through the registered church. | ||
| You heard the shift. | ||
| What Christianity is really about at its best is love. | ||
| They're twisting Christian values to get them to adopt left-wing and democratic policy positions. | ||
| So there's a whole bunch there. | ||
| It's interesting to note, James, that you're an atheist, and here you are, you're actually trying to defend the church, in essence, or at least the Christian ideas from the government, sort of bamboozling them about what their own movement about. | ||
| I think that's just an interesting subtext. | ||
| I'm an American first, Dave. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Yeah, God bless you. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| But the real reason that I wanted to show this was because I'm seeing there's this sort of fight around it bubbling on the right, and I keep telling everybody that the one group of people that can move right now are what you're calling the center-left people, the disaffected libs, the Rogan, Bill Maher types, Elon Musks, who are lifelong Dems, who are ready to vote Republican, and then your point, James, is that magically this doc is gonna come out, there's gonna be all these articles about actually, These Christian Republicans are the real racists. | ||
| Josh, you are an Orthodox Jew, or at least a modern Orthodox Jew. | ||
| Can I call you that? | ||
| Orthodox, do you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't want to force you. | ||
| You're a traditional Jew in America. | ||
| You have a lot of common cause with, I think, the NatCon people, this movement, maybe not as it's portrayed right there, but what do you make of what's happening here? | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here, obviously, and I think James and I have slightly different takes on the so-called Christian nationalist phenomenon. | ||
| Look, the term Christian nationalism is in severe disrepute right now. | ||
| That, I think, would be an understatement. | ||
| Stephen Wolfe wrote a book about this. | ||
| It turns out that Stephen Wolfe is a very bad man. | ||
| It turns out that Stephen Wolfe is actually a virulent anti-Semite. | ||
| Absolutely disgusting stuff about Jews, about the Talmud, the Torah, stuff like that on Twitter. | ||
| So Stephen Wolf has done a tremendous, a tremendous disservice to the cause that he is purporting to advance. | ||
| And you know, furthermore, I don't want to go in the weeds too much. | ||
| There's this one website called the American Reformer, and that's trying to speak for a very kind of nationalist conservative strand for primarily Protestant Christianity. | ||
| One of my good friends whose name I will leave off wrote a really nice essay for this website condemning anti-Semitism in all its forms. | ||
| He wrote this essay post-October 7th. | ||
| And unfortunately, the ratio that he got on Twitter and the comment section, very much egged on, by the way, by Stephen Wolf, who I mentioned, was just a total poop show. | ||
| I mean, like, the ratio was horrible. | ||
| So, I am very skeptical right now of the precise term Christian nationalism, given how much it is used. | ||
| Having said that, you know, you mentioned the whole national conservative movement. | ||
| I am very much an American nationalist, and I do very much believe That Christians should be more publicly and indeed politically Christian. | ||
| That's my reading, Dave, of American history. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to go back too much to the American founding and who said this and who said that and relitigate that whole debate, but I generally do think that America is better off when we are a more Christian country. | ||
| I think that many of our woes and our maladies in recent years, the transgender phenomenon, the gender ideology, the environmental radicalism, a lot of these Phenomenons are ultimately coming from trying to fill the void in largely, I think, secular people's souls from the lack of God. | ||
| I mean, I think that's a very often made point. | ||
| I happen to think it happens to be correct. | ||
| And I think that America's, I think the Jews also are a much better, a much better state in America when America has a more vibrant church, a more vibrant evangelical Protestant church in particular. | ||
| So I do support all of those things, but the specific term Christian nationalism has really, really been badgered by Stephen Wolf and people like that. | ||
| And I actually do really agree with James that the threat of it is being tremendously, tremendously overstated. | ||
| And then I think it probably is a PSYOP. | ||
| That's probably an accurate description to use. | ||
| So James, for those of us, because you and I, James, people at least were of the left at one point and let's say aren't anymore, what does the sane right look to you as a secular atheist who in no ways is a traditional conservative? | ||
| What does that movement that you want for the lefties to come over to, what does it look like? | ||
| You know, honestly, I expected to disagree with Josh with his characterization of this, and I'm really glad that I agree with what Josh just said. | ||
| I think it looks a lot like what Josh just explained, to be completely honest with you. | ||
| What you have to understand is that there are documents, for example, there's a 56-page document that was filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation with the House Unselect Committee for January 6th. | ||
| Indicating that it wasn't Trump or MAGA that caused January 6th. | ||
| It was in fact Christian nationalism is the thread that ties it all together. | ||
| Another document was was pushed through members of the churches themselves. | ||
| I'm assuming many of the same people who are in that documentary trailer we just watched. | ||
| In fact, I know some of the names match and that it was making the exact same case like a call from inside the house help us churches are under threat from Christian nationalism and And the general idea is to tie insurrection and domestic extremism to Christian nationalism that will then be instantaneously expanded through the vertically integrated messaging apparatus to all of Christians. | ||
| Christians are the cause of all of the problems in the country, and it's going to accelerate that already unfortunate circumstance that we have, this division that we have | ||
| around religion, and I think that actually having Christians be Christians and knowing their doctrine | ||
| and knowing their beliefs and being able to profess that and call to repentance and forgiveness, | ||
| open doors to welcome people in who are struggling and to minister to them, which is | ||
| literally their role, could go a lot further than trying to get involved in some kind of a weird chest-beating | ||
| movement that's going to get tied and then blown out to the widest possible proportions | ||
| in order to smear good Americans, just like what happened actually with January 6th. | ||
| Well, I think people can see why I wanted to play this clip with both of you on the show, because I think it's fascinating to see a largely secular atheist and a traditional Jew both saying that, oh, we could use a little more Christianity in the country is quite fascinating. | ||
| And we'll kind of leave it there. | ||
| I really wanted to do that. | ||
| mostly as just for people to put a pin in it, because they are going to be hearing this phrase more and more, and I hope they'll be able to look back and go, oh, we were trying to frame this for you in somewhat of an honest way. | ||
| I wanna do one more thing with you guys, because the elderly man pretending to be president has dementia. | ||
| Everyone knows it. | ||
| It's getting worse and worse. | ||
| It's bubbling, finally, into the mainstream. | ||
| And here, we showed this earlier in the week, but here he is with the King of Jordan. | ||
| And tell me if this gives you great confidence in the office of the presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Over to you. | |
| [inaudible] | ||
| [gavel] | ||
| Mr. President. | ||
| Mr. President. | ||
| Josh, there were an awful lot of flubs and misdirections and the rest of it that I could have played this week. | ||
| Something about that one, the stiffness of the hands, walking the wrong way, being confused. | ||
| He clearly looks at a direction on the floor, then leaves it, go to the other place, then leaves that. | ||
| Like, what is going on here? | ||
| How much more do you think this can hold, honestly? | ||
| Like, the mainstream cannot run cover for this much longer. | ||
| Or can they? | ||
| Are they just that good? | ||
| You know, here's the problem, David. | ||
| I mean, here's the Catch-22. | ||
| So my reading of what's happened in the past two years, I think Democrats started to freak out as early as late 2021, early 2022, when it came to Joe Biden's physical and mental health. | ||
| And as early as the summer of 2022, you start to see some venerable progressive commentators, Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, columnists, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, Politico, CNN, they all started for a few months there to start to sound the alarm. | ||
| David Ignatius of the Washington Post actually went as far as to say, | ||
| "For the good of the Democratic Party, for the good of the country, | ||
| Joe Biden should actually not run for re-election." | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| The problem is that Joe Biden got to Washington, D.C. | ||
| literally over a half century ago, and he's wanted to be president of the United States | ||
| his entire adult life. | ||
| He literally first ran for president in 1988, the year before I was born. | ||
| So good luck trying to get this man to step aside at this point and not run for re-election. | ||
| So, you know, unless they can do the whole Jeffrey Epstein thing, unless Hillary Clinton perhaps has one more trick up her sleeve and can make Joe Biden mysteriously fall down a flight of stairs, I think that they're stuck with them. | ||
| They really are. | ||
| So they're going to try to run cover, but the American people can see it for themselves. | ||
| But, you know, more to the point, Dave, not just the American people, you know, what are the people around the world thinking, for goodness sake? | ||
| Especially at a press conference like that. | ||
| Where the King of Jordan comes on stage, and we didn't hear it there in that clip, but says some disgusting things, by the way, about the conflict in Gaza. | ||
| So the whole kind of combination of the optics of this senile man, who clearly has no idea what he is doing, fumbling around, combined with the vicious vitriol being spewed by the King of Jordan there when it comes to the substance of what's happening in Gaza, was just a terrible, terrible look for the country, full stop, period, end of story. | ||
| James, doesn't Biden seem like the perfect avatar for America at this very moment? | ||
| He doesn't know who he is and where he's from, and it's just all confusing, and yet we're just doing it over and over. | ||
| Like, it feels like he's an extension of exactly what we've become. | ||
| Now, there's a little chicken or egg there, but that's what it feels like to me. | ||
| Until we finally choose to move on. | ||
| Yeah, well that's pretty poetic as a way to put it. | ||
| Maybe it also is that he's going to white-knuckle it, like Josh was saying, to the last possible moment. | ||
| Which I honestly think is to our advantage if he white-knuckles it to the last possible moment because the things that have piled up around him and that are so visible are piled up and so visible. | ||
| What I think is that he's the perfect avatar for what the Democratic Party regime is doing. | ||
| They're willing to put up a visible puppet. | ||
| They are willing to... I mean, it looks like he's made the bargain in Faust. | ||
| I don't know if you know the story, but Faust makes a deal with the devil. | ||
| Mephistopheles shows up, gives him all the powers. | ||
| He gets the girl, he gets the stuff. | ||
| But the trick is, the way that story is written, is that the devil doesn't take your soul when you die, he takes it before you die. | ||
| So then you walk around as a powerless shell after getting what you think you wanted and your life stinks until you die and it feels very much like the Faustian bargain has come true for him. | ||
| But it's just a show that they want to put up somebody who's feeble, who looks weak, who looks harmless, harmless, sleepy, Grandpa Joe. | ||
| They want to put up somebody who looks stupid and like a bubbly teenage valley girl like Kamala Harris as his number two so that you think, well, they can't be doing something that bad. | ||
| They're just dumb. | ||
| They're just incompetent. | ||
| And I think that I feel I'm much more cynical about this than that. | ||
| I think they're the perfect avatar of a craven party apparatus that's willing to do whatever it has to do to get power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely, absolutely. | |
| You could not be this obtuse when it comes to the border and all of the other policies. | ||
| And yes, Josh, you're totally right. | ||
| King Abdullah went on like a crazy rant with a series of lies and Biden doesn't have the acumen or ability to speak up and call any of it out. | ||
| I wanna just show you two more clips before we let you guys go of the defense that the system is giving Joe Biden. | ||
| So here is diversity hire Karin Jean-Pierre explaining that Joe Biden shouldn't have to take a cognitive test. | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| Just everyone, would everyone just calm down please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you think about the idea of taking that kind of a test? | |
| I mean look, and I talked about this last week too, on I believe, on Friday. | ||
| I have known this president since 2009. | ||
| He is not just my boss, you know, he's also a mentor to me. | ||
| And I spent sometimes countless hours with him, whether it's in the Oval Office, | ||
|
unidentified
|
whether it's on the road. | |
| And I believe, for me, you're asking me my personal opinion, he is sharp. | ||
| He is on top of things. | ||
| When we have meetings with him, with his staff, he's constantly pushing us, trying to get more information. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so that has been my experience with this President. | |
| Anything else outside of that, I just shared with you what Dr. O'Connor said to me, and so I'll just leave it there. | ||
| My director just said to me while we were playing that, don't worry, Dave, that's how we'll defend you when you start to slip. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| No one believes this woman when it comes to anything else. | ||
| So if Joe Biden was remotely okay, wouldn't they just let him take the freaking cognitive test and then move on? | ||
| But they can't, right, Josh? | ||
| I mean, they simply cannot. | ||
| You know, Dave, the next time I go to the Hard Rock Casino here in Florida, remind me to not go to the poker table with Corinne Jean-Pierre because, boy, does she have one heck of a poker face. | ||
| I mean, not just bursting out laughing or just crying hysterically when that question was raised there. | ||
| And her lack of emotions is wild. | ||
| But, look, to get back to the question you were asking a few minutes ago about how much can they cover up, Robert Herr himself, that special counsel report was beyond damning. | ||
| And, you know, here's the key point. | ||
| Do you know who made that report public? | ||
| Robert Herr's report? | ||
| It wasn't Robert Herr. | ||
| It was actually a confidential report that Robert Herr filed to the Attorney General Merrick Garland. | ||
| It was Merrick Garland himself who deemed that it was so in the national interest of the United States that this thing actually see the light of day and all 300 plus pages actually become public. | ||
| Now the Democrats want to go to the point where they're accusing Merrick Garland of some sort of like Republican deep state psychological warfare operation, the same guy Who called those at teacher's meetings in October 2021 who were protesting critical race theory. | ||
| He said they were domestic terrorists. | ||
| If you want to say that those people, Merrick Garland, that he's a right-wing extremist, I guess go there. | ||
| You're going to lose that argument. | ||
| So they can't hide from this. | ||
| And to your point, David, really is ultimately that simple. | ||
| If they have nothing to hide, then just take the test. | ||
| Final point real quick. | ||
| When Karine Jean-Pierre says, I've known this president since 2009, It literally means nothing. | ||
| I mean, Joe Biden's cognition in 2009, he'd probably be the very first one to admit that it was orders of magnitude better than it is today. | ||
| By the way, Josh, we've been to the Hard Rock Hollywood together. | ||
| I was there one week ago today, and I saw 89-year-old Frankie Valli sing for an hour and a half with no intermission, and he is way sharper than Joe Biden, I'll tell you that much. | ||
| Actually, James, I'll throw to this last clip and let you chime in. | ||
| So you were referencing before how they're sort of creating the idea of Christian nationalism to be a really scary thing so you don't see what the real problems are. | ||
| Well, take a look at AOC and what she's got everybody really worried about right now. | ||
| We need to understand what we are staring down in this country. | ||
| If Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, we do not know if there will be a verifiable next election that has integrity. | ||
| He already tried. | ||
| We saw on January 6, he tried to overturn the results of a presidential election by force, by inciting a riot. | ||
| And I think we need to be very, very realistic about the grave, grave impacts of a Donald Trump election. | ||
| It is not a joke. | ||
| It is not a game. | ||
| We need to protect our democracy. | ||
| And ideally, it's going to be on progressive values. | ||
| Not if I have anything to say about it, lady. | ||
| First off, it would be nice if Jake Tapper could ever chime in and push back or say anything counter to these people, but okay, we're past that point. | ||
| James, that's sort of connected to the earlier segment, right? | ||
| Like, it's what they're gonna do with Biden is the same thing that they're doing with Christian nationalism. | ||
| You must find something scary. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, obviously. | ||
| And the iron law of AOC projection never misses. | ||
| She's telling you by saying that the Trump presidency is so scary and that there might not be a verifiable election. | ||
| She's telling you. | ||
| She's telling you that that's what the Democrats are up to. | ||
| Just because I wanted to throw this in. | ||
| It's so perfect. | ||
| I've had to put my smart person glasses on so I can read because what they really are is old people glasses. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| to myself for that. | ||
| I want to read to you actually a famous exchange from Chairman Mao, Zedong of China, regarding cognitive tests, well not really, actually regarding school examinations, but what he said is, do away with all the examinations. | ||
| What are examinations for? | ||
| It would be no good if examinations were necessary for any course. | ||
| All examinations should be abolished, absolutely abolished. | ||
| Who examined Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin? | ||
| Who examined comrade Lin Pao? | ||
| Who examined me? | ||
| And so that's what I see when I see Whatever her name is, diversity hire up there saying that he doesn't need to take any cognitive tests. | ||
| I see Mao saying, why should we have to test anybody? | ||
| They're approved by the party. | ||
| They're, they're approved. | ||
| And, um, unfortunately that has tremendous historic precedent. | ||
| It also has historic precedent to what AOC just said, which is that we aren't going to have verifiable, if we read it through the iron law of AOC projection, that she's projecting what they're doing onto her enemy, uh, is that, um, The same thing. | ||
| Who needs an election? | ||
| Who needs to have some kind of an examination by the people? | ||
| We have the party has approved the Biden administration or the Democratic apparatus, whatever it happens to be. | ||
| We don't need to have examinations. | ||
| We don't need to test this. | ||
| We need to be very afraid of what will happen if the other side were to get power, because that's exactly the situation that we are already in. | ||
| And so I think it's a chilling reminder, actually, these things are Downright funny, but they're also a chilling reminder of what the Democratic Party, I think, is up to these days and that has historically a name, which is communism that's taken on some new form that's not quite communist all the way in the same old way. | ||
| And we should take him seriously at these these threats. | ||
| Gentlemen, I thank you for your time. | ||
| I think this is going to be one of the shows that we post every now and again to show people that we were trying to warn a little in advance of some of this nonsense. | ||
| James, if you want to get on a quick flight over to Miami, Josh and I and our Florida crew are going out for drinks tonight. | ||
| I don't know if you want to make that happen, but in the free state of Florida, anything is possible. | ||
| To everyone else, there's no post-game show today, and we are actually off all next week, so at 11 a.m. |
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