April 5, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The White House called me the night before saying, we know that you're going to be loyal, you're President Biden's most loyal supporter, which like... | ||
| It's so reminiscent of something you'd hear from The Godfather. | ||
| I really started redoubling my efforts about Biden's cognitive decline because it was so apparent to me that there was something wrong here. | ||
| He was not like this in 2017 or even 2019. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are America, second to none, and we own the finish line. | |
| Dave, we didn't have a president. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| We had a council of these unelected people that you've never even heard of, and they're Anita Dunn, Mike Donnell, and Steve Reschetti. | ||
| Three of them were running the country. | ||
| What led you to becoming a Kamala advisor? | ||
| When I speak to her on a one-on-one basis, she's not an idiot. | ||
| But when she talks on stage, she just, her brain completely melts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Talking about the significance of the passage of time. | |
| So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. | ||
| I am writing a book, and people should be scared. | ||
| they should be scared because I know exactly where the bodies are buried. | ||
|
unidentified
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Music. | |
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is The Rubin Report, and joining me today is a former Kamala Harris campaign advisor turned critic of the Democratic Party, Lindy Lee. | ||
| Lindy, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| What do you think of that intro? | ||
| I had a couple different ways I could go to describe you in one sentence. | ||
| Did that... | ||
| Dave, that was perfect. | ||
| That was nice. | ||
| That wasn't vitriolic. | ||
| It was exactly what I needed. | ||
| Thank you, and it's such an honor to join you. | ||
| Everywhere I go, actually, people mention your name and hold you up as an example of someone who's really gained the loyalty and admiration of the entire party, including, by the way, Sean Spicer. | ||
| He was just singing your praises the other day when I was on with his show. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that. | ||
| And, you know, I said to you right before we started, this is the first time we've ever spoke, but we did chat for about 30 seconds before the cameras rolled, that I'm always interested in people who are evolving, who are thinking about things a little bit differently. | ||
| And yours, especially to the backdrop of an election that was, you know, only five or six months ago, barely, is particularly interesting. | ||
| But before we get into the evolution... | ||
| And how would that all happen? | ||
| For people that don't know you, can you just give a bit of your background? | ||
| What led you to becoming a Kamala advisor? | ||
| And then we'll get into the politics of everything. | ||
| Well, I think in terms of what led me to help support her campaign, we all fell into it because we were all supporting Biden's campaign. | ||
| And as a member of DNC leadership, we had to do what we were told. | ||
| No one asked for our input or our feedback. | ||
| As soon as he dropped out on July 21st, all of us got shunted to Kamala Harris' team. | ||
| So I just want to let you know that there was no room for outside mediation at all. | ||
| It was what the party wanted. | ||
| And she wants the media to think, actually, I'm writing a book and laying out the entire truth of it. | ||
| She wants the media to think that, oh, July 21st, Biden dropped out. | ||
| I just found out I was going to be the nominee. | ||
| That's not true at all. | ||
| She had been vetting VP nominees prior to July 21st and getting ready for this, getting ready for this ascension. | ||
| But so in terms of why I supported her, it's because that's what the party told us to do. | ||
| And I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, which I did, but then realized that she couldn't articulate a vision. | ||
| She hid from the media for about a month. | ||
| For a month, in the middle of a 107-day campaign, which speaks volumes about the quality of candidates she is. | ||
| And by the end of September, mid-September, I just stopped fundraising. | ||
| And by the way, I'm not a staffer. | ||
| I was appointed to leadership. | ||
| I did this in a volunteer capacity. | ||
| I'm a mega-donor. | ||
| I donate my time and my resources. | ||
| I donated buildings to the campaign because I wanted to. | ||
| I'm not a staffer or consultant. | ||
| Just to be clear, because I feel like a lot of people don't realize that. | ||
| Yeah. And just tell me a little bit about your history, even before you got involved in the Biden campaign and everything else, just so people have a little backdrop to the sort of pre-presidential politics, Lindy. | ||
| I was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. | ||
| And then, actually, I've always wanted to run for Congress because, Dave, let me tell you, this is just the truth of it. | ||
| If Republicans were... | ||
| My one issue, one of my major issues is clean air and clean water. | ||
| I really care about that. | ||
| I grew up, I was born in an authoritarian regime where pollution was so incredibly intense where you could slide your finger down the window and then look at it and it's black. | ||
| So I saw firsthand the environment is a huge issue to me. | ||
| If the... | ||
| If Republicans were stronger on that issue, I would have been Republican like 15 years ago. | ||
| I'm just going to be very frank. | ||
| So you're an investment banker. | ||
| You end up working in the administration. | ||
| You were doing, and China obviously is the country that you're from, you were doing outreach for Asian American community with Biden. | ||
| Then was there a point before Biden stepped down that you realized things weren't going right, either with his cognitive ability that... | ||
| You know, many of us were talking about online or just with the policies. | ||
| I mean, were you feeling frustrations or was it all that on the day they flipped the switch that you suddenly started seeing things differently? | ||
| Absolutely, Dave. | ||
| And I'm going to name names. | ||
| They know who they are. | ||
| Throughout 2023, I raised concerns actually before, but it really, I really started redoubling my efforts about Biden's cognitive decline because it was so apparent to me. | ||
| That there's something wrong here. | ||
| And I've known Biden for a long time. | ||
| I've known him actually not because of politics, but because I raised money for cancer research. | ||
| Cancer research is something close to my heart. | ||
| And I sat on the board of the American Association for Cancer Research. | ||
| We met through that, through a non-political arena. | ||
| So I saw the marked decline in Biden. | ||
| He was not like this in 2017 or even 2019. | ||
| I think the stresses of the office really accelerated his decline. | ||
| I'm not a medical... | ||
| Doctor. That's just my guess because it was so obvious to me. | ||
| And I brought it up to Ken Martin. | ||
| And do you know who Ken Martin is? | ||
| Does that name ring a bell? | ||
| Ken Martin was like... | ||
| He's now the chair of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Oh, he's the chair? | ||
| He was the chair of the Democratic Party. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. So he was vice chair at the time that I brought it up. | ||
| I said, don't you think there's something wrong here? | ||
|
unidentified
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Don't you think maybe we need a new candidate? | |
| And I said this to him in Chicago in 2023. | ||
| I remember Wendell Pierce, the guy from The Wire, the actor, was standing next to me. | ||
| My brother was standing next to me. | ||
| So I said this in front of other people too. | ||
| And he completely poo-pooed my concerns. | ||
| Like I was crazy. | ||
| Like I was some insane woman for bringing it up. | ||
| I really felt like I was being... | ||
| I felt crazy. | ||
| He made me feel ridiculous for bringing it up. | ||
| And then I realized I was being gaslit, you know, and basically told I shouldn't believe my lying eyes. | ||
| I approached him. | ||
| I told Jenna Malley Dillon, the chair, who ended up being the chair of the Biden-Harris campaign, about my concerns. | ||
| She wrote down my... | ||
| Contact info never got back to me. | ||
| So I made repeated attempts. | ||
| I leaked to the press. | ||
| I leaked to Politico, saying that Biden couldn't run. | ||
| I reached out to party chieftains. | ||
| I genuinely thought... | ||
| Dave, I really wanted to... | ||
| I thought that the Democratic Party would be the vehicle to save our country. | ||
| I know there's going to be people who criticize me for saying that. | ||
| But I tried so hard because I wanted someone who's actually capable of being commander-in-chief. | ||
| And finally, sorry for talking your ear off. | ||
| Hey, it's an interview! | ||
| In July 2024, I went on Fox News Sunday and I said it on air. | ||
| Oh, before I did, they threatened me because they print the Fox News Sunday guests the night before Politico, as you probably know. | ||
| And so the White House called me the night before saying, we know that you're going to be loyal, you're President Biden's most loyal supporter, which is so reminiscent of something you'd hear from the Godfather. | ||
| So they threatened me and then I went on and said my piece anyway, that Biden should step aside. | ||
| I got two to three angry phone calls on July 21st after my appearance on Fox News Sunday saying that Biden was too old. | ||
| And then what do you know? | ||
| That day he steps down. | ||
| Yeah. So you think that the people that you were talking to that were gaslighting you or ignoring you or saying everything was fine, do you think that they genuinely felt that or was everyone just kind of in on the unsaid thing? | ||
| It sort of reminds me of the ridiculous right now, whereas I'm sure you know about a month ago, Jake Tapper. | ||
| Part. People that were manipulating him, part people just going along with the flow. | ||
| Do you think it's just like multiple layers of everything? | ||
| I think you're totally right, Dave. | ||
| And Jake Tapper in particular pisses me off so much because he's the one who went on air and repeatedly attacked people for bringing it up. | ||
| Yeah, Larry Trump, yeah. | ||
| Like making me feel crazy. | ||
| But I will be, I do will say, his cognitive decline notwithstanding, he was always kind to me. | ||
| I do want to make that clear. | ||
| This is very hard for me to do. | ||
| Biden was always kind to me, but that doesn't negate the fact that he was wrong for America. | ||
| And I can only apologize because it took me a while to see it. | ||
| Because I knew him, you know, in a private capacity through the cancer research. | ||
| He treated me and my parents so well. | ||
| And I kind of like... | ||
| Please forgive me, but I judge people kind of according to how they treat my parents, whom I love. | ||
| Like, they were just so good. | ||
| And my parents are immigrants, so for them to meet the United States president was just such an overwhelming experience. | ||
| And I'm so glad that President Biden was gracious. | ||
| But he was just completely wrong. | ||
| He shouldn't have been there. | ||
| He shouldn't have run. | ||
| He certainly shouldn't have run a second time. | ||
| But with Jay Tapper, he wasn't in the room. | ||
| I'd never seen him at any event. | ||
| All the intel from his book is secondhand, and he was one of the foremost proponents of the lie. | ||
| Dave, let's be honest what it was. | ||
| It was an outright lie that he was cognitively flipped, that he was basically a genius behind closed doors. | ||
| His book basically is like a slap in the face to those of us who are punished for bringing it up. | ||
| And I mentioned the White House, but I also got booted off of MSNBC and CNN. | ||
| I used to be on it all the time. | ||
| I was a regular. | ||
| After I raised the age issue, I was only on MSNBC once. | ||
| that was it. | ||
| And every time somebody would book me, I would find out like five minutes before the hit that Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson, would be replacing me. | ||
| And the first time it happened, I was like, okay. | ||
| Yes, I got my hair red and everything. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| But life happens. | ||
| But then it happened again and again and again. | ||
| I was like, okay, this is clearly something's up here. | ||
| So they replace him and basically you guys are all kind of sat down or pretty much told to get on board this thing. | ||
| Were you hearing, you kind of implied this before, but were you hearing grumblings about how it was going to go down or when it was going to go down? | ||
| Or were there different factions in the White House that, you know, there was, it sort of seemed like, okay, maybe... | ||
| Joe didn't know exactly what to do or wasn't aware, but Jill kind of wanted him to stay versus some of the people that just wanted him to just get into the office of the presidency so then he could step down because people kind of thought Kamala was no good. | ||
| Like, what level or what did you see in all of that? | ||
| Dave, you're right over target. | ||
| I will adjust what you said, though. | ||
| Jill didn't kind of want him to stay. | ||
| Jill desperately wanted him to stay. | ||
| And please bear in mind that during this time Biden had COVID, And Hunter was basically sitting in on White House meetings. | ||
| High-level meetings that require security clearances. | ||
| This guy is a... | ||
| Honestly, I'm not even entirely sure if he's a recovering drug addict. | ||
| They did find cocaine at the White House in an area that he was one of the few people that was in. | ||
| Exactly. And it's undeniable that he peddled his influence to enrich himself in the big guy, quote unquote. | ||
| So this is a guy sitting in the Oval Office, listening in on top level White House meetings throughout this time, throughout the month of July. | ||
| And I know because my friends are senior aides, you know, to like Steve Ruschetti and Nina Dunn. | ||
| So Biden was like incapacitated this entire time because he was really sick. | ||
| And remember that a few days before, Trump suffered the assassination attempt. | ||
| So people were freaking out. | ||
| They rightly thought that the election was over. | ||
| How do you beat a guy like that? | ||
| And the way that he handled that with such self-possession, I would have been freaking out. | ||
| I would have been hysterical. | ||
| No, no, it was incredible watching him, that moment of composure and everything else. | ||
| Right. I mentioned that because Democrats were... | ||
| Incomplete disarray would be putting it mildly. | ||
| And this is the thing that people don't understand, or they don't even know, and it hasn't been reported. | ||
| There was no money coming in, other than the monthly recurring ActBlue donations that they trick you into giving, obviously. | ||
| But this is not an exaggeration. | ||
| There was no money coming in after the debate. | ||
| Like, I mean, zero. | ||
| There were staffers. | ||
| Who I would just be like shooting shit with on the sofa because they had nothing to do. | ||
| And we would just be commiserating because everybody lost faith. | ||
| So Biden kind of markets his decision as an act of patriotism. | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| There was no money coming in. | ||
| So there was no way he would have continued. | ||
| There's just no way. | ||
| Putting the money part aside, and everyone knows he was having huge fundraisers with George Clooney and Obama not too long before the debate, but putting the money part aside, do you have any insider info as to what... | ||
| The day or two before he stepped down was like, I mean, we keep hearing that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, you know, basically got him behind closed doors. | ||
| There's that other story about how they would hide him from people that were trying to get in. | ||
| Mike Johnson told Barry Weiss that story about how for months they kept delaying meetings and it was just sort of becoming obvious. | ||
| But do you have any insider stuff on those few days before? | ||
| Like, what was it like when they finally got him to do that if Jill was really pushing him to keep going? | ||
| Yeah. And I want to say, I first hinted at this on the Sean Ryan show, and then suddenly that new book that's coming out, Fight, I hate even mentioning it. | ||
| I don't want to give them free advertising. | ||
| But they were repeating something that I already said two months ago, like it's some new intel. | ||
| I will expand on that. | ||
| The role of Congressman James Clyburn has been seriously underestimated in the public sphere. | ||
| He played such a huge role in so many instances of Biden's recent life. | ||
| Starting with his 2020 campaign. | ||
| If it hadn't been James Clyburn, there would have been no Biden presidency. | ||
| I want to be extremely clear about that. | ||
| Because he came in fifth in New Hampshire. | ||
| He was done. | ||
| And he bombed in Iowa, too. | ||
| Dave, do you remember this? | ||
| Yeah. Well, I remember they were basically trying to push him out and bring Mike Bloomberg in. | ||
| And then that thing blew up. | ||
| Exactly. How many delegates did he win? | ||
| Right. Right. | ||
| Anyway, so James Clyburn saved his butt by endorsing him and allowing him to win the South Carolina primary. | ||
| If it hadn't been his intervention, Biden would have been done. | ||
| And that was the point at which Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and everyone made a work or rally around him. | ||
| That was Clyburn. | ||
| Clyburn is also the person that made him appoint Kentonji Brown Jackson. | ||
| The woman who can't say who a woman is. | ||
| Right. Hired because she, or nominated because she was a woman, just doesn't know what a woman is. | ||
| Exactly. And let's just be very clear. | ||
| All these people are DEI candidates. | ||
| Oh, and I forgot to mention that Kamala Harris is picked also largely because of James Clyburn. | ||
| And James Clyburn, the reason why I'm bringing it up now is that Biden's original intention, which Biden's original intention was to not endorse Kamala that day at all. | ||
| But the fact that Biden endorsed her so quickly afterwards was because of James. | ||
| So what is the influence that James had over Biden? | ||
| It's South Carolina. | ||
| That's salvation. | ||
| Because there would be no presidency were it not for Clyburn. | ||
| And he kind of flies under the radar. | ||
| But Clyburn is at every major fundraiser. | ||
| I always see him at VIP events. | ||
| He has his youngest looking wife. | ||
| I forget her name. | ||
| And the two of them would just be there, like meandering the crowd. | ||
| They're always there. | ||
| I hosted Biden-Harris here in Philadelphia in February 2023. | ||
| Clyburn was there. | ||
| I raised half a million for them in September, right after the debate in D.C. And Clyburn was there. | ||
| He's there everywhere, just exerting a quiet influence. | ||
| And I'm just, I'm genuinely shocked that the public hasn't caught on. | ||
| So what's the connection between Clyburn and what most people seem to think, or at least the people who are talking about this, which is that it was this Pelosi-Schumer game. | ||
| What's the connection there? | ||
| Clyburn was a Biden loyalist to the last. | ||
| I bring up the Clyburn thing is because he is a source of a lot of the DEI that came out of the Biden administration. | ||
| He wielded tremendous power. | ||
| The people who most, you're right in that Pelosi, And actually, Adam Schiff, another person who really wanted Biden out. | ||
| They worked hand in hand. | ||
| And honestly, I wanted Biden out. | ||
| And I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| I checked in. | ||
| I texted Adam Schiff right before I went on Fox News Sunday, just like saying, here's a heads up. | ||
| I'm going to ask that the president step down. | ||
| Are you okay with that? | ||
| You know, at that time, you know, I can't really. | ||
| As a member of the party, you don't just freelance, okay? | ||
| I had a duty to make sure that everyone on the team knew what I was doing. | ||
| So, did Clyburn have something to do with ultimately pushing him out? | ||
| In the most specific way I can possibly ask that. | ||
| Yes. In that he made his wishes known before Biden dropped out that he wanted Kamala Harris. | ||
| That was very telling. | ||
| And Clyburn, unlike Biden, is in full control of his mental faculties. | ||
| He wouldn't say something just to say something. | ||
| He picks his words very carefully. | ||
| And the fact that he came out and said, if Biden drops out... | ||
| I would support Kamala. | ||
| The fact that he said that at all was a huge tell, and we all heard it. | ||
| And that provided the quote-unquote permission structure for the rest of us. | ||
| He wasn't as obvious as the Schumers and the Pelosi's of the world, of course not. | ||
| But he definitely, at that point, we were all so fed up, so angry at Biden. | ||
| And the only people who honestly wanted him to stay were those on his payroll. | ||
| And those with the last name Biden. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And I do want to get to the Kamala portion of this. | ||
| And you've really, I would say, uncovered a lot of the nonsense that we could all see was happening with the campaign and the ridiculousness of it. | ||
| And then some of your own political evolution. | ||
| But just to fully get there, so do you have any insight into what happened on the day that Biden stepped down? | ||
| I mean, was there a meeting? | ||
| It seems that there was likely a meeting. | ||
| I'm trying to word this totally correctly, that there was likely a meeting with Schumer, Pelosi, at least, and Joe and Jill Biden, and it seems that Joe Biden wanted to continue. | ||
| That's what he told the ladies of The View. | ||
| He did not continue. | ||
| So do you have any insight into what happened that day? | ||
| That day, I don't think Pelosi was in person with him. | ||
| I think Schumer had visited him days before, and it was much to, you know. | ||
| Much to his consternation, it basically failed. | ||
| Biden was stubborn AF, as always, and he was sick throughout this time. | ||
| So mind you, there weren't many people visiting him. | ||
| He had COVID. | ||
| Also, that was a convenient excuse for him to hunger down. | ||
| What I will say is people were kept in the dark about the timing of the including the highest echelons of the United States government. | ||
| For example, Anita Dunn, whom I worked in close concert with, had no idea. | ||
| She did a conference call that morning telling people that we would stay the course, that they would stay the course. | ||
| And so she had only like a minute heads up that the announcement was coming. | ||
| And I can't stress enough how high up Anita Dunn was. | ||
| She was basically part of the council presidents. | ||
| Dave, we didn't have a president. | ||
|
unidentified
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We had a council. | |
| Of these unelected people that you've never even heard of, and they're Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, and Steve Reschetti. | ||
| Three of them were running the country. | ||
| Most Americans, I would say maybe like 1%, if that, have heard of them. | ||
| Right? So just to be clear, you don't know who was in the room when he made that final decision, if we're to believe that he... | ||
| Steve Reschetti, Mike Donilon, and his family. | ||
| Oh, so you do know. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just saying that Nancy Pelosi wasn't there on that day, yeah. | ||
| And by the time they hated her so much, they continue to hate her so much. | ||
| I don't think it's something that can be amended at this point. | ||
| There's so much animosity. | ||
| And I also want to mention that Team Harris and Team Biden hated each other throughout. | ||
| Not just the final year, but throughout. | ||
| So they make the decision. | ||
| Now she becomes the nominee. | ||
| In some sense, you're saying you were probably relieved because you didn't think he had the mental capacity to be president, and in essence wasn't the president. | ||
| It was president by committee. | ||
| Now it's Kamala, just a couple days later. | ||
| Were your initial feelings like, okay, this will be better? | ||
| Dave, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| That's just my attitude towards people in general. | ||
| My assumption is that you're not an asshole, that you're not an idiot. | ||
| Maybe you haven't spent enough time in D.C. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I mean, the default in D.C. is asshole self-interested backstabber, right? | ||
| But now I know. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, after everything I've been through these last couple months. | |
| But with Kamala, I came here to be fully transparent and honest with you. | ||
| Kamala Harris has always been So I really wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| I've been to her holiday parties. | ||
| I've been to so many things at the Naval Observatory. | ||
| Every time there's a major event, I would be there. | ||
| I know Doug, too. | ||
| I really wanted to give my friends the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And people ask me why I didn't leave sooner. | ||
| Do you know how hard it is to leave your entire world? | ||
| These people aren't just political figures to me. | ||
| They were my friends. | ||
| They were my entire universe. | ||
| I just quickly realized this is not someone who can lead the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. | ||
| I also didn't want to cause a mess by saying that I was leaving. | ||
| It's kind of like this is an airport. | ||
| You don't have to declare your departure. | ||
| I kind of just... | ||
| Stopped fundraising in the middle of September. | ||
| She had a good debate, frankly, but a lot of the things that were going on in the party, I just couldn't stand for it. | ||
| It completely shook me that they didn't respond to the gender-affirming surgery ad. | ||
| I'm very much against that. | ||
| I've always been against that. | ||
| I fought against the leftists in the party five years ago. | ||
| People think that I just jumped out of nowhere and I've been a conservative. | ||
| No, I've been fighting the left flank for like half of my life. | ||
| AOC called me out on Twitter saying that I would, at that time it was Twitter, because I hinted that I would rather vote for Trump than Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And so she crucified me over that. | ||
| And I remember crying so hard that I broke the blood vessels underneath my eyes. | ||
| At that time, I didn't have experience getting canceled. | ||
| Now I'm canceled every week, and I'm not cancelable. | ||
| But at that time, it was my first cancellation, so to speak. | ||
| And because I dared to question the leftist narrative, and because I said we need to move back to the center. | ||
| Actually, five years ago, Ben Shapiro provided me a home because I had no home. | ||
| And so for me, this is not overnight. | ||
| Frankly, I've been occupying the middle ground for all my life, and they've been lurching the left, and I've been moving, shifting to the right, because as you get older, you get wiser. | ||
| I know a little bit about that story myself. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know, Dave. | |
| You are the embodiment of that. | ||
| As I mentioned, I read as many comments as I can, and everyone's like, you should learn from Dave. | ||
| Watch this incredibly inspiring story. | ||
| And one thing I do want to say about you, Dave. | ||
| I've had a number of health issues because of this. | ||
| We don't have to go into that. | ||
| But somebody mentioned, actually a number of people mentioned you. | ||
| When you first left the party, you were under so much physical strain. | ||
| Like not even just psychological, emotional, but physical strain. | ||
| Like it was really hard on you. | ||
| No, I developed it. | ||
| People know I did that. | ||
| You look so handsome nowadays. | ||
| Like, just read my comments. | ||
| Just Google, like, well, at Lindy Lee Rubin. | ||
| There's so many people saying how remarkable you look now, how healthy you look. | ||
| You know, you are thriving. | ||
| It takes a while, but, you know, at first you were beaten down because they were just brutal to you. | ||
| But look at you now. | ||
| Well, that's very kind of you to mention. | ||
| And it's weird because, you know, it's funny because when I was leaving the left or whatever you want to call it, my career started exploding. | ||
| And yet I was dealing with so much hate. | ||
| And then I developed this crazy autoimmune disease and I lost huge amounts of my hair and I was taking all this medication. | ||
| So I look back on those videos that so many people remind me of all the time, why I left the left on PragerU. | ||
| It's been seen like 40 million times or something. | ||
| And I look at the video and I'm like, it's hard for me to even look at myself. | ||
| So it's a weird... | ||
| Dichotomy between like success and then also that I was going through something that, and by the way, when you tell me that, that you've gone through some health things as it relates to all this, I've heard that a lot from people that go through this because suddenly your side hates you and that is so, that is such a slap in the face. | ||
| It is so at odds with everything that you want to believe as a liberal. | ||
| That the liberal side will be acting illiberal, that it puts you in this position. | ||
| Exactly. And suddenly, the party of DEI, actually some fringe actors on the right also, have, I don't even, you know the Streisand effect, you shouldn't really amplify lies. | ||
| Yeah, it's not worth it. | ||
| Heinous, heinous stuff. | ||
| Heinous stuff. | ||
| And, yeah, this has been the worst period of my life. | ||
| No contest. | ||
| So, Well, you know what? | ||
| You're going to have a whole bunch of new people finding you from this that have been through that journey. | ||
| So that's the beautiful thing, right? | ||
| Like you tell the truth and then new people find you. | ||
| That just is it. | ||
| But so as you were breaking now and you're starting to realize, boy, she is not ready to do this. | ||
| Did you feel that the subtext to that was that this was the final move of the Democrats going completely crazy to the left? | ||
| Like it wasn't just about that maybe she was incompetent, but that whatever you were She was, you bring up a really good point, Dave. Yeah, I just, she was pretending to be a moderate when I distinctly remember her praising woke on stage. | ||
| I think she said, it's good to be woke. | ||
| Oh, of course. | ||
| I mean, there's a million examples. | ||
| Right. And she lambasted someone, too, for... | ||
| I have no... | ||
| Like, she would just say this crazy stuff. | ||
| And then... | ||
| I just don't understand, because when I speak to her on a one-on-one basis, she's not an idiot, I don't think. | ||
| Unless my powers of discernment are completely off. | ||
| But when she talks on stage, she just... | ||
| Her brain completely melts. | ||
| And it occurred to me that we don't just have one leader in cognitive decline. | ||
| We had two. | ||
| And I just don't trust her to be handling our nuclear arsenal. | ||
| I mean, this is no joke here, okay? | ||
| This isn't some playground political thing. | ||
| This is our nation at stake. | ||
| So at the end of it... | ||
| Because the left had gotten so crazy and doubled down on identity politics, and the chair of the party who continues to attack me to this day for calling him out for lying about Biden's cotton decline, he called me a narcissist for pointing that out, by the way. I don't know what that has to do with me. | ||
| I was talking about him. | ||
| But these people who love identity politics were running the show. | ||
| I couldn't bring myself to vote for Kamala. | ||
| I left it blank. | ||
| And I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| At that time, I couldn't bring myself to vote for Trump either. | ||
| And that's the honest truth of it. | ||
| Right. So let's pick up there because I think that'll kind of get us to the rest of the evolution, let's say. | ||
| So, okay, you don't vote for Kamala. | ||
| You don't vote for Trump. | ||
| I did vote for my senator. | ||
| You did vote for your senator. | ||
| Oh, you voted for Fetterman. | ||
| You're in Philadelphia? | ||
| Fetterman ran four years ago. | ||
| Three years ago. | ||
| I voted for Bob Casey because... | ||
| Ah, yes. | ||
| Yeah, who actually lost. | ||
| He was one of the most moderate members of the Senate. | ||
| And also, I knew him personally. | ||
| He's a pro-life... | ||
| Very few pro-life Democrats out there. | ||
| Also, just a decent guy. | ||
| That's a dime a dozen these days. | ||
| But okay, so you officially... | ||
| Did you make an official announcement that you were leaving the party or you basically just said, I'm not... | ||
| I'm not part of this anymore. | ||
| Like, I'm not fundraising for you people. | ||
| I'm not advising anymore. | ||
| Was there like an announcement that was made? | ||
| Dave, I love how people think there's this grand plan and I have this PR team and all that was orchestrated. | ||
| Right. I literally survive day by day. | ||
| I have no team. | ||
| It's just me. | ||
| I don't have an entourage. | ||
| I don't have an assistant. | ||
| Every day, I just speak my truth and it leads to something else. | ||
| I never planned on leaving the party. | ||
| But how do you stay? | ||
| How could you ask someone to stay in an abusive relationship? | ||
| Am I allowed to use profanity on here? | ||
| No. This is the internet. | ||
| Do your thing. | ||
| Even today, go look at my comments. | ||
| I'm speaking out on immigration, which is something I really care about. | ||
| They call me a slut, chink, whore, cunt, whatever. | ||
| On a daily basis. | ||
| And all that is fine. | ||
| I mean, it's not fine, but I can survive it. | ||
| But when you attack my family, and you find their address, you find my, again, with my parents. | ||
| When you attack my parents, who have frankly had nothing at all to do with this, it just, it's not, it's like beyond crossing the line. | ||
| And then when you defame me to the point where a member of the Trump team has to offer me a lawyer, I now have Tim Palatori, who represents Pete Hegseth. | ||
| We share the same lawyer because you're defaming me on both the right and the left. | ||
| You can call me whatever, but you cannot defame my character and call me a traitor to this country. | ||
| I love my country. | ||
| I love America. | ||
| I would do everything for my country. | ||
| I would go to war. | ||
| I would fly a bomber jet and drop bombs on our enemies for this country. | ||
| I would do anything. | ||
| I've condemned our enemies, Communist China, more times than I can count throughout my life. | ||
| They killed my great-grandfather. | ||
| I hate that regime. | ||
| Xi Jinping is a piece of shit. | ||
| So you can call me whatever you want, but you cannot defame me. | ||
| Maliciously, you just can't. | ||
| And so that is what bothers me. | ||
| It's not the name-calling. | ||
| It's not the harassing. | ||
| It's when you maliciously make things up about me that you know not to be true. | ||
| And then there's one person who did, and I gave her an hour and a half to prove it. | ||
| And she couldn't. | ||
| I was just sitting there on her show. | ||
| I don't want to name names here. | ||
| She's going to come after me again. | ||
| But it's just so ridiculous, Mandy. | ||
| It's just so bad. | ||
| So you have... | ||
| This evolution, this wake up, all of these things. | ||
| Now it's post-election. | ||
| You're talking about some of the corruption that you've seen that you've laid out here. | ||
| And you've now gotten sort of welcomed into the more conservative world. | ||
| You've been on a lot of the shows. | ||
| You've talked to a lot of these people. | ||
| Has any of that been surprising to you? | ||
| I mean, if I go back 10 years, I remember when I started doing it, the thing that I really was surprised by was that... | ||
| Everyone was nice. | ||
| Conservatives were kind and decent and loved to agree to disagree and would break bread with you after and that they were fun and smiley and happy and generous of spirit and they weren't just concerned about money and war. | ||
| And as sort of ridiculous as that sounds, I think a lot of people go through that period and yours obviously not in the too distant future, if you agree that that's fair to say. | ||
| I totally agree with you. | ||
| And I totally agree with you. | ||
| I've gotten thousands of emails from people around the world, even like American expatriates in Australia saying, you know, we're so proud of you. | ||
| We know how hard it is. | ||
| I will say, though, Dave, again, I'm here to be fully transparent and honest. | ||
| 99% of conservatives are amazing. | ||
| I would say actually 99.5%, like very, very high, like basically everybody. | ||
| But there's a small segment of influencers. | ||
| Influencers in particular who are so pissed off. | ||
| They think that you're after their income or whatever. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| I don't want a job. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| Look at me. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm here in a penthouse. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I don't need anything. | ||
| I'm not after a job in the Trump administration, which is another allegation. | ||
| You couldn't even pay me to work for the government. | ||
| But there are some influencers out there who are so bad that I jumped the line. | ||
| Tarami is a communist. | ||
| Someone call me a communist ass, whatever that means. | ||
| Even though my family was killed by the communist regime. | ||
| Even though I went to war with the communists and the Democratic Party for all my life. | ||
| And so, yes, conservatives as a whole are the best people. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| It's the mercenary influencers who do this for a living. | ||
| They think that it's a zero-sum game. | ||
| And if you win, they... | ||
| If you win, they can't win too. | ||
| And it's just such a deeply hurtful mentality because I'm not here to take anything from anyone. | ||
| I just want to talk. | ||
| I think mercenary influencer is a good way to put it. | ||
| I try not to play in that pool. | ||
| You're not. | ||
| I wouldn't have approached your team. | ||
| You are one of the... | ||
| Shining stars in this conservative ecosystem constellation. | ||
| One of the best people. | ||
| And when I was on Pierce Morgan with you, before we had even spoken, I could see the kindness in your eyes. | ||
| You should go back. | ||
| Our clip went viral. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| The clip of me talking on Pierce. | ||
| You were in the back just nodding. | ||
| We'll throw some B-rolls so people can watch it while you and I are talking. | ||
| Yeah, but I could just tell. | ||
| I think I can read body cues really well. | ||
| You were so embracing of me, and I so desperately needed it at that time. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Well, the way that show works, you're in these four boxes, and you don't always know who the other person is. | ||
| In this case, I knew who you were, but I didn't know you in any way. | ||
| But, you know, you hear something decent, and great. | ||
| It's like, okay, we're on the same team now. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| Plus, we had... | ||
| A former boss of mine screaming at me like a lunatic, so it didn't take much to push us together. | ||
| But tell me a little bit more about, do you feel that your politics have now evolved, let's say post-election? | ||
| So you get welcomed into this new world, you're with a lot of these conservatives now, these are people who you were about to vote against, you know, six months ago. | ||
| Do you feel that you've shifted in any way ideologically, or do you still think that you're kind of the same and the party's gone, which obviously a lot of people say that sort of thing? | ||
| Dave, I'm going to tell you one thing. | ||
| There's a managing editor at Fox, and I reached out to him about a year ago saying that I don't belong here anymore. | ||
| A year ago. | ||
| And so he's going around telling people, I trust Lindy. | ||
| The thing is, she's not faking now. | ||
| She was faking then. | ||
| And I'm sorry that I faked. | ||
| Because the party just shifted beneath my feet. | ||
| I started as a Democrat when I was 13. And this whole time, the party, under Obama, it just went so extreme. | ||
| It became this woke monster. | ||
| And I never signed up for that. | ||
| This entire time, they were my entire world. | ||
| I grew up in Philadelphia. | ||
| It's an extremely liberal city. | ||
| I went to an extremely liberal university as well. | ||
| I continue to live in an extremely liberal city. | ||
| I ran for Congress as a Democrat. | ||
| People have to understand that I wasn't just a rank and file Democrat. | ||
| I was part of leadership. | ||
| It's almost impossible to leave. | ||
| It was so hard for Tulsi to leave. | ||
| I actually know. | ||
| It's so hard. | ||
| It's not that my views have changed. | ||
| It's that my views have been revealed and I can finally talk about it. | ||
| The person who I love the most in the world actually was teasing me the other day. | ||
| He's like, I used to be so embarrassed because you would just go off on your right-wing tangents in Ubers and Lyfts and everyone over here. | ||
| He's like, now you don't have to whisper. | ||
| Yeah. Or you can move down to Florida. | ||
| You never have to whisper about anything. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I'm actually thinking about moving to Miami. | ||
| Surprise, surprise. | ||
| I'll show you all the cool spots. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it's so good to finally be myself. | ||
| It's so good to vocalize my views on immigration. | ||
| I'm a naturalized immigrant. | ||
| We came here the right way. | ||
| It pisses me off to no end that Democrats worship migrants at the expense of American people. | ||
| It's frankly, it disgusts me. | ||
| And these are views that I could never say before. | ||
| When I voiced my opposition to affirmative action years ago, they called me a bigot and a racist. | ||
| And what people don't understand is that, oh, and Democrats are now attacking me as a DEI hire. | ||
| First of all, number one, I'm unhirable. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| There's nothing you can do to make me- And Asians definitely don't fit into that calculator. | ||
| Exactly. So I'm not a DEI hire because Asian American women in particular are the highest scorers of exams, SATs, ACTs. | ||
| So, they don't know. | ||
| They just don't know. | ||
| Enough about that. | ||
| But yeah, so, I lost that original question. | ||
| So do you consider yourself a Republican? | ||
| I mean, I always say to people, look, I wrote a book. | ||
| It might be the best-selling book in American history about defending classical liberalism. | ||
| So it's not that I don't have my classically liberal beliefs anymore. | ||
| I still do. | ||
| I've shifted a little bit, I would say, right economically, probably. | ||
| But I still have the same beliefs, and I just feel like I'm on the, let's say, slightly more liberal wing of a wide tent. | ||
| Republican Party. | ||
| I'm not a traditional conservative Republican, obviously, but I think in the MAGA movement there's plenty of room. | ||
| It seems to me you're kind of in the same spot as me, but do you consider yourself a Republican now? | ||
| Do you walk around going, I'm a, you know, laminated card Republican, it's in my pocket? | ||
| I would say I am. | ||
| Dave, you'd be surprised to hear that I am so far right on immigration that I think I'm off the charts. | ||
| You'd be surprised. | ||
| Are you going to round up some people after this interview? | ||
| Are you going to round up some people after this interview? | ||
| We could keep the camera rolling. | ||
| I'm happy to be the Asian Christine Ohm. | ||
| If it were up to me, we'd stop immigration today and make sure that only geniuses and people couldn't actually contribute to an American society. | ||
| Like my father, he ended up at Harvard Medical School. | ||
| He saved lives. | ||
| And he switched to real estate, created hundreds of American jobs. | ||
| These are the people we should bring into the country. | ||
| We shouldn't bring in parasites, people who are a drain on the United States Treasury. | ||
| I feel strongly about that. | ||
| I'm also very conservative socially and very conservative fiscally. | ||
| I grew up with nothing and we built something amazing through hard work and determination, didn't take a handout from anybody. | ||
| So all these experiences shaped my worldview. | ||
| I'm extremely far right on these issues. | ||
| However, I'm also a strong environmentalist. | ||
| I'm sorry, I can't ever relinquish that. | ||
| I'm very Nixonian in that regard, in that I love what Nixon originally did with the EPA and the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. | ||
| What I don't like is a Green New Deal and the fact that Democrats have used my issue, loving the environment, loving our heritage. | ||
| As a chance to impose these Marxist and communist ideas on the country. | ||
| That's not what I signed up for. | ||
| I signed up for clean air. | ||
| And are you seeing Trump or this administration go after the environment in a way that you're not happy with? | ||
| I mean, I know Lee Zeldin, who's heading EPA right now, he's cut a lot, what seems like blatant waste and a lot of DEI stuff with Doge out of EPA. | ||
| I love cutting DEI stuff. | ||
| Right. So have they done anything that you know of as far as the environment that you're not happy with yet? | ||
| I mean, is there something there? | ||
| Um, not yet. | ||
| I'm watching very carefully. | ||
| I'm sitting on the edge of my seat. | ||
| I really, um, I have to tell you, this is going to sound really gross, but I want to give people a graphic understanding of what pollution is. | ||
| I spent three years in China. | ||
| I was born there, unfortunately. | ||
| I would give anything to rewrite my history. | ||
| To be born is something else, by the way. | ||
| It's a story for another day. | ||
| It's hard not to hate yourself when other people hate you for something that you can't change. | ||
| But that's a different story. | ||
| So China is so polluted that when you sneeze, your mucus is black. | ||
| Do people know that? | ||
| So I've experienced that myself. | ||
| And that really traumatized me and that scarred me for life. | ||
| And I don't want our country to be like that too. | ||
| And so for me, it's really just a matter of pollution. | ||
| I'm also a runner. | ||
| I run outside every day. | ||
| I love nature. | ||
| I love the woods. | ||
| I'm very TR. | ||
| I just want to protect. | ||
| I think America is the most beautiful country on earth. | ||
| We've got to protect our heritage for our generation, for the next generation. | ||
| I don't like what AOC is doing. | ||
| She's trying to couple this environmental issue, what Greta Thunberg and her people are doing. | ||
| The environment should not be a political thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? Everyone should be able to get behind it. | |
| Not only do I think Lee Zeldin's a good guy, but look, Trump's got Bobby Kennedy now. | ||
| He's at HHS, but this is a guy who has spent his life protecting wildlife and talking about our national parks and forests and everything else. | ||
| I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised on that front. | ||
| What's next for you, Lindy, besides moving to Miami? | ||
| We're almost out of room, so you gotta get moving quick. | ||
| You know, I was in Miami for PBD's podcast. | ||
| It really changes your entire mental health. | ||
| It's like an entire different universe. | ||
| It's like 30 degrees up here, but paradise down there. | ||
| So I'm very happy for you. | ||
| I am just gonna keep living my life. | ||
| I told you, I am writing a book, and people should be scared. | ||
| People in the Democratic Party from Biden on down. | ||
| I remember everything. | ||
| I'm a very strong hippocampus. | ||
| And everybody, they should be scared because I know exactly where the bodies are buried. | ||
| And also the people who abandoned me after I told the truth. | ||
| And the people who bought into the lies about me. | ||
| I remember it all. | ||
| And I'm sorry. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not going to protect them. | ||
| I protected them for so much of my life. | ||
| I'm not going to offer that protection anymore. | ||
| And my goal... | ||
| ...is to prevent the current iteration of the Democratic Party from ever gaining power again. | ||
| I feel like it's my duty and responsibility. | ||
| I know Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| I know Kamala Harris. | ||
| I've met Gavin Newsom. | ||
| They are not equipped to run our country, and all of them are going to run for some office again. | ||
| Our work is cut out for us. | ||
| I have thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I told you before I started, these are the conversations I enjoy the most. | ||
| Watching someone go through it and you can feel the passion and the pain and the hope and it's all there. | ||
| So we will do this in person next time in Miami. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| That would be the honor of a lifetime, Dave. | ||
| Everyone that I've spoken to about you was completely right. | ||
| Completely right. | ||
| You are a gem. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| It was my pleasure, thank you. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |
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