Feb. 27, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| We are in dire straits in England and Britain, but things can be turned around. | ||
| I think, you know, one of the big issues we're facing, I mentioned immigration, there's a problem of the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country. | ||
| But that's not... | ||
| Part of that problem is that we are... | ||
| There's a kind of liberal, progressive... | ||
| Two-tier approach to justice. | ||
| So where I'm hopeful is I look to, let's say, Singapore. | ||
| I look to the Emirates and the Saudis who have, you know, Singapore has 20% Muslim population. | ||
| The Saudis and the Emirates are obviously Muslim-majority countries, but they're very outspoken about how to deal with Islamism. | ||
| In Britain, Islamism is a serious problem. | ||
| One in a hundred British Muslims are on a MI5 jihadi watch list. | ||
| Something like 95 people have been killed by Islamists since 2005. And we've got a lot of issues with... | ||
| Those groups mixing. | ||
| But I think if we take law and order seriously, we get rid of two-tier system, we actually punish perpetrators and people start respecting the law, then we might actually have social cohesion come again. | ||
| So Winston Marshall, you just said something interesting off camera. | ||
| Hopefully you can repeat it on camera. | ||
| That you think of yourself or you identify as British, not English. | ||
| From an American perspective, I don't think anyone would know what that means. | ||
| English, not British. | ||
| English, not British. | ||
| You see? | ||
| English over British. | ||
| So I do identify as British, but English primarily. | ||
| Even though I'm not entirely ethnically English. | ||
| I'm a real mutt, a Euro mutt. | ||
| But let's just give a bit of context for listeners. | ||
| We're at ARC, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. | ||
| One of the... | ||
| Debates being had both on and off stage is that what is the story we tell ourselves? | ||
| What is the identity? | ||
| And then outside of ARC, why this is such an important question for Britain is because mass migration, illegal and legal, is probably the most important issue of the day. | ||
| And so we have... | ||
| Quite literally, millions coming every year, or up to a million, let's say, has been... | ||
| Well, no, sorry, over a million some years, gross, of migrants coming to the country. | ||
| And there's conversations about, well, we've seen social disunity. | ||
| We've seen social cohesion crumbling. | ||
| We've seen different groups separating parts of London. | ||
| You'd have had to drive through Whitechapel where the signs aren't even English anymore. | ||
| And English is not even the first language. | ||
| So the conversation has been had of who we are, how are we to tell people who are moving here what to integrate into, what to assimilate into, if we ourselves cannot identify who we are. | ||
| I'll add further, I spoke at Oxford University at a Roger Scruton lecture, a famous conservative intellectual, passed a few years ago, and it was full of conservative students talking about identity. | ||
| And then after I spoke, I asked everyone in the room to say, what do you think it means to be English? | ||
| And not one of them. | ||
| Gave the same answer. | ||
| And it had a complete total range, including someone who said, well, it doesn't really mean anything to be English. | ||
| Another classic thing here is, oh, to be English is just fair play and tolerance. | ||
| I'm like, well, that's what the Americans have. | ||
| That doesn't distinguish us from them whatsoever. | ||
| So back to the complex issue of English identity. | ||
| Someone like Roger Scruton himself would say it's from place. | ||
| And you might say, well, you're from... | ||
| England, and if you're born here, then that makes you English. | ||
| Well, that's complicated, and I'll explain why. | ||
| For example, Elon Musk, ethnically partly English, from South Africa, very much an American citizen. | ||
| Likewise, you could be completely ethnically English, have lived 300 years in America, but you're not English. | ||
| You're an American. | ||
| That's partly because there's an ethnicity, you are administratively somewhere from a place, and then there's the cultural. | ||
| Aspect as well. | ||
| And to make things all the more complicated, all of these realms, domains rather, and the ethnicities or the identities themselves are porous. | ||
| So even if you come up with a conclusion, you will have to say, except in these... | ||
| Times it's complicated and more. | ||
| There are exceptions, I think. | ||
| So there's no clear-cut rule on what we are. | ||
| Now, what I said to you before we started rolling is, I identify as English over British. | ||
| And it is the British identity that actually unifies the Scots, the Welsh, the English, the Northern Irish, and all of the non of those who are in Britain. | ||
| From across, whether you're from Jamaica, Nigeria, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, is... | ||
| Nigerian heritage, she would identify, I assume, as British. | ||
| So there's a question. | ||
| We're in a bubble, I think, particularly with mass migration. | ||
| Now, the conversation we're having before is, so I identify as English. | ||
| I find it harder to articulate what it is to be British. | ||
| British is a 300-year-old concept. | ||
| Well, I guess it's not a 300-year-old concept, but the Act of Union was in 1707 when Scotland and England combined. | ||
| England is 1,100 years old. | ||
| In fact, we have our 1,100-year anniversary in two years' time, I think. | ||
| And it was founded by... | ||
| Well, King Athelstan founded it, but I would say we go back to King Alfred the Great, who united the English against the great heathen army. | ||
| I identify with that heritage. | ||
| So for me, national identity is... | ||
| And people off camera, I'm interested. | ||
| They're going to disagree with me. | ||
| But it is to take on the heritage of a people as if it is your own and to actively participate in it. | ||
| So I think you can go to America, like Elon Musk is, and become an American because he's taking on the heritage from the founding fathers as if it is his own heritage. | ||
| And then moving forward. | ||
| And taking on and participating in that heritage. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| You know, you can come here to this country and you might not be ethnically English, but you hypothetically could participate. | ||
| A famous example from the scripture would be Moses' wife, who was an Abyssinian woman, but she's very much part of Israel. | ||
| Israel, a nation without a state as it wandered through the desert to the Promised Land. | ||
| She was, I would say, part of the Israel tribe. | ||
| Again, there's a problem with identity as you get into semantics. | ||
| I'm doing a lot of thinking out loud here. | ||
| Well, you've given me about 20 ways to go here, but I guess the main one is, so do you think that all of the problems that your country seems to be facing right now are downstream from this? | ||
| It's downstream from this inability to define itself properly. | ||
| Well, it actually gets worse because there's a deliberate attack as well on all things that might be deemed positive about our identity. | ||
| So this happens in the education system. | ||
| There was a polling done last week that something like only 10% of young British people in that range would fight and die for that. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Country. | ||
| And unfortunately, these kids have been taught that we are a bad people. | ||
| They're not being taught the truth, which is that we are the people that defeated Napoleon. | ||
| We are the people that ended slavery. | ||
| We are the people that defeated Hitler and the Nazis. | ||
| We had some help from across the country. | ||
|
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We could. | |
| But that is... | ||
| Infinitely proud history to take on and have. | ||
| And they're not being taught any of that. | ||
| In fact, they've been taught the opposite. | ||
| We are the perpetrators, irredeemably so, of the slave trade. | ||
| And that somehow, whatever Hitler did, that the idea of nationalism, it's not okay to be... | ||
| Just because the Germans did such a terrible, evil stuff, that we can't be proud about our own history. | ||
| You know, we learned a lot of different lessons than the Americans did after the Second World War. | ||
| You, I think, learned that America defeated the Nazis, and so that's something to be proud of. | ||
| In Europe, the lesson seemed to have been nationalism is bad. | ||
| And so we had a sort of divergence there. | ||
| That's very fundamentally different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically, there's an attack from all sides. | ||
| Mike, the point I was making right at the beginning is that leaving aside the progressive radicals who are trying to deliberately take apart our culture, even those who are proud of our culture aren't struggling to all agree on what it is that our culture is, what it is that our identity is. even those who are proud of our culture aren't struggling Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's much of what this conference is about. | ||
| Obviously, it's not fully about just the UK, but clearly, identity for all of the Western nations is kind of top of mind here. | ||
| Are you hopeful? | ||
| I keep asking everybody this, but are you hopeful that, you know, you guys will straighten this out? | ||
| I mean, there's major problems that, you know, from... | ||
| Deportations and closing borders and then still having to fix all of the internal mess that's here. | ||
| My hope has been with seeing Trump's win in the States because what we saw there is a yanking of the Overton window. | ||
| I was in New York City during the election and I saw young people wearing MAGA hats around Soha. | ||
| It was unthinkable in 2016. And clearly... | ||
| A culture can shift and can change. | ||
| We are in dire straits in England and Britain, but things can be turned around. | ||
| I think one of the big issues we're facing, I mentioned immigration, there's a problem of the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country. | ||
| But part of that problem is that we are... | ||
| There's a kind of liberal, progressive, two-tier approach to justice. | ||
| So where I'm hopeful is I look to, let's say, Singapore. | ||
| I look to the Emirates and the Saudis who have, you know, Singapore has 20% Muslim population. | ||
| The Saudis and the Emirates are obviously Muslim-majority countries, but they're very outspoken about how to deal with Islamism. | ||
| In Britain, Islamism is a serious problem. | ||
| One in a hundred British Muslims are on a MI5 jihadi watch list. | ||
| Something like 95 people have been killed by Islamists since 2005. And we've got a lot of issues with... | ||
| Those groups mixing. | ||
| But I think if we take law and order seriously, we get rid of two-tier system, we actually punish perpetrators and people start respecting the law, then we might actually have social cohesion come again. | ||
| And you think that might happen? | ||
| Well, we've got to stop. | ||
| We've got to get migration under control as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It depends who's in government. | ||
| For a long time, I was against... | ||
| I didn't think... | ||
| I didn't really believe in politicians to solve our problems. | ||
| I believe that you should do things with social enterprises and even business enterprises, and that's actually how you move things along. | ||
| But clearly, it's come from the political classes and the Westminster Uniparty that so many of our problems, going back to Tony Blair, through the... | ||
| Conservatives, I actually at this point think that Boris Johnson is the most despicable of the lot. | ||
| A lot of this happened under his watch. | ||
| We actually had a MAGA victory in 2019. By MAGA victory, what I mean is a coalition against progressive excesses. | ||
| And it just didn't do anything. | ||
| Well, it was under Boris Johnson's leadership and he not only squandered it, but he turbocharged all the bloody problems. | ||
| Net zero, lunacy, we had the Boris wave of immigration just going through the roof. | ||
| Boris Johnson, there's rumors that he might make a comeback, and Americans might like him, but he's sold out our country. | ||
| But let's look at another conversation. | ||
| Let me just ask you one other thing, which we've discussed before, but worth mentioning. | ||
| I mean, because the free speech situation here is, let's say, less than stellar, and people are getting arrested for memes and all a bunch more, how worried are you in your day-to-day life that you're going to say something on a show like this, or put out a tweet, or whatever, and then have someone come knock on your door? | ||
| From an American... | ||
| It's like completely unthinkable. | ||
| I've quite literally had phone calls from my lawyer about tweets saying that technically it's illegal. | ||
| I'll say this about free speech because it came up in J.D. Vance's speech in Munich at the Munich conference. | ||
| I have a feeling that the concept that free speech is a British value is an import from America. | ||
| I'm not totally convinced it is. | ||
| We had blasphemy laws until 2008. We had the sedition laws until 2009. The reason we're famous for free speech is because we have philosophers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, John Milton, we have these great arguments for free speech. | ||
| But the reason those arguments were had is because free speech didn't exist. | ||
| If you go back to the Bill of Rights, 1689, the only thing about free speech in there was parliamentary privilege, that you could say what you wanted in parliament. | ||
| We don't even have that. | ||
| I mean, last year, Nigel Farage's parliamentary privilege was... | ||
| Revoked over the Southport killing, he wasn't allowed to say. | ||
| And then he was debanked too, wasn't he? | ||
| That was either earlier in the year or the year before. | ||
| That's another problem. | ||
| But the point I want to make is the only defence we have for free speech today in Britain is from the European Convention of Human Rights, Article 10. But if you read the article, Part A. You have freedom of speech, part B, except in these situations. | ||
| And then it's just a long list of things you can't, including whatever your nation state decides you can't. | ||
| And then if you look at British, the laws against free speech, I mean, there are dozens of them. | ||
| So we definitely don't have free speech now. | ||
| When J.D. Vance says in his speech that free speech is a shared value, I'm not totally convinced free speech is one that we have here. | ||
| In fact, I believe that the First Amendment in America... | ||
| Was because they saw what it was like not to have free speech in Europe, and they were like, well, we have that here. | ||
| Maybe he meant we'd like to share it. | ||
| We'd like to share it with you. | ||
| I'd like to have it also, but I'm not sure we've ever really had it. | ||
| We will continue to exercise our free speech, my friend. | ||
| If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
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