April 18, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:39
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, people. | ||
| Just like the logo says, this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and it's time for another Friday Roundtable extravaganza. | ||
| This is an all-star episode. | ||
| I'm calling it right now. | ||
| We've got Rubin Report veterans, the host of the Winston Marshall Show, Winston Marshall, as well as the founder of New Discourses, James Lindsay. | ||
| Winston James, I've called this an all-star show. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure on a Friday. | ||
| Do you think you're up to it? | ||
| That wasn't an all-star start. | ||
| It wasn't an all-star start, guys. | ||
| Amateur hour. | ||
| Well, we'll start this way. | ||
| We're going to catch up on a bunch of the sort of, I guess, cultural craziness. | ||
| We're going to bounce a... | ||
| Across the Pond to your country, Winston, although you are in our country at the moment, you are a Brit at heart and by birth. | ||
| We're going to do some stuff coming out of the UK. | ||
| We're going to talk about what has happened to the good old libs, which I think we kind of are or were, or at least were around a lot. | ||
| We'll talk a little bit about Trump and Harvard. | ||
| And then they sent Gayle King to space, and she came back, and she's very, very excited about it. | ||
| But let's start Across the Pond, because... | ||
| In the UK, they have decided officially, it is law now, that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. | ||
| Very exciting. | ||
| This from the BBC. | ||
| UK Supreme Court rules legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. | ||
| Judges say the concept of sex is binary while cautioning that the landmark ruling should not be seen as a victory of one side over another. | ||
| Transgender people will still have legal protection from discrimination, the court adds. | ||
| The Scottish government had argued that transgender people, | ||
| With a gender recognition certificate, GRC, are entitled to sex-based protections, while For Women Scotland argued they only apply to people who are born female. | ||
| For Women Scotland says it's grateful for the decision after a long road of legal battles, while charity Scottish Trans urges people not to panic. | ||
| The Scottish government says it acted in good faith and will work with Westminster to understand the full implications of the ruling. | ||
| Winston, I have to start with you. | ||
| This is a good day for your country. | ||
| Are you happy with this decision? | ||
| Do you agree with this decision? | ||
| And what type of genitals do you have? | ||
|
unidentified
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I should correct an earlier point. | |
| I am actually back home in Britain. | ||
| It is indeed a glorious day here on Turf Island. | ||
| I should just explain. | ||
| Anyone who heard you read that just there might be a little bit confused. | ||
| I'll explain what the contention is. | ||
| In 2004, There was the Gender Recognition Act, which meant that anyone going through a certain protocol could apply and get a gender recognition certificate, i.e. | ||
| they could identify officially and legally as the gender not in line with their biological sex. | ||
| This got confusing in 2010 when the Equality Act was passed, which said that there was equal protection under the law dependent on Amongst other things, sex. | ||
| But that 2010 Equality Act did not state whether or not it was biological sex or other. | ||
| So, a group, as you mentioned, Four Women Scotland, who are backed, I should say, by J.K. Rowling, the great J.K. Rowling, of course, needs no introduction. | ||
| have been fighting this battle, first in the Scottish courts, and it's gone all the way to the top court, the Supreme Court, where the judges unanimously voted that the Equality Act should be biological sex. | ||
| It should be interpreted as biological sex. | ||
| Now, having said that, the Gender Recognition Act and gender recognition certificates are still available, so you can, if you want, still apply for a change of gender. | ||
| Although now we're defining gender and sex differently. | ||
| So that's the big thing that's happened. | ||
| And it's been a great day for the gender-critical women and activists. | ||
| And I should say it means a lot in real terms. | ||
| It means that women's spaces are protected. | ||
| It means that in public life or in the public sector, women, when it comes to quotas, when it comes to various things, will not include... | ||
| men who identify as women. | ||
| And hopefully it will encourage a culture in the private sector also differentiating between biological sex and gender. | ||
| I appreciate the clarification. | ||
| I also feel I owe you an apology because I've been to your place in New York. | ||
| That was obviously not it. | ||
| And Connor, can you go to the wide shot on Winston for a moment? | ||
| That is very obviously a British study that you are in right now. | ||
| It's a British chair. | ||
| The colouring is British. | ||
| The lighting is British. | ||
| It's very, very British. | ||
| Steel-coloured paint and a map of the Isle of Man behind me, yes, is very much... | ||
| Tea and crumpets just out of the shot right there. | ||
| You did mention J.K. Rowling, of course, creator of Harry Potter, and she's been fighting the gender-crazy people for a long time. | ||
| She saw this ruling, and she wrote this, I love it when a plan comes together. | ||
| Supreme Court, hashtag women's rights, and there she is, smoking a cigar, drinking a cocktail, and she has gotten just so much hate because of standing up for women. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| James... Whether you want to take this from the British angle or not, I mean, you've been fighting against this stuff forever. | ||
| You've been at the forefront of explaining where it's come from and everything else. | ||
| Do you view this as kind of a seminal moment in the pushback against all the gender nonsense? | ||
| Yeah, it's an important moment. | ||
| I do appreciate also, which I think you will do with me as well, Dave, that J.K. Rowling made an A-team reference there. | ||
| That is the A-team she's referencing. | ||
| Not all the Zoomers are going to quite get that. | ||
| They don't know about the black van and they're not getting to know playing Hannibal. | ||
| That is fantastic. | ||
| This is important. | ||
| I mean, I was listening to everything that Winston just said very seriously and all the things that you read and trying to be serious, and I just kind of laugh the whole time. | ||
| It's all just so absurd. | ||
| And so this, I think, is a seminal moment in the world starting to recognize that this has been absurd. | ||
| I mean, just imagine we've got J.K. Rowling now. | ||
| We've got gender recognition certificates. | ||
| It could be Harry Potter and the gender recognition certificate. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Absolutely absurd. | ||
|
unidentified
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Harry Potter and the gender recognition certificates. | |
| I have a certificate. | ||
| I have a certificate. | ||
| I mean, so for me, I mean, we could talk about as much of the philosophy or the details of the legal battles or whatever, but this is a major court making a major step that's finally saying, wait a minute, reality exists again. | ||
| Let's put our feet back on Earth. | ||
| And it makes it almost... | ||
| You know, it's going to open the door to give us the permission to start laughing at how absurd this has always been. | ||
| And I do think it's a seminal moment in changing hearts and minds on the issue. | ||
| Speaking of absurd, we're going to get back to genitals in just a second. | ||
| But since we're talking about J.K. Rowling, she has gotten so much crap. | ||
| Because of taking the position that women are women and men are men, but you should still individually respect people. | ||
| That they've basically kicked her out of Harry Potter world. | ||
| I'm pretty sure she's not allowed to go to Universal Studios anymore, but look at this. | ||
| And of course, that's the original Severus Snape, played by Alan Rickman. | ||
| They're redoing it, and he's going to be that guy. | ||
| Winston, you're British. | ||
| Come on, do something with this. | ||
| It's just another extension of this nonsense. | ||
| He was described as a tall, thin guy with a long nose in the book, and it's just like, why do they just keep doing this? | ||
| Just create a new character. | ||
| I definitely get annoyed when historical characters get changed and turned into all sorts of opposite races intentionally, and they wouldn't do that. | ||
| For example, you wouldn't, of course, have Nelson Mandela portrayed by Brad Pitt. | ||
| I think when it comes to something like this... | ||
| Yeah, it would go against the description in the book. | ||
| But, you know, it's not personally something I'm going to lose hair over or sleep over. | ||
| But I just want to say something about J.K. Rowling. | ||
| She's really put her, as you say, her neck on the line. | ||
| But it's been a tremendous cost. | ||
| She's utterly villainized in this country. | ||
| And I also note that she's a woman of the left. | ||
| As far as I understand it, she's been a Labour supporter for much of her career. | ||
| But she's one of the most generous women this country has ever produced. | ||
| Not only does she quite literally pay... | ||
| She must have paid into the billions in taxes. | ||
| So she's basically supporting the economy. | ||
| But on top of that, she's donated... | ||
| Huge sums. | ||
| She must be, if not the biggest philanthropist in the country, one of them, and possibly the biggest female philanthropist in the country. | ||
| So her generosity has seen no bounds. | ||
| And the way she's been villainized and continues to be villainized, even today, by the gender-critical activists that we see online, is really disgraceful, frankly. | ||
| And so this is a really special day for her. | ||
| And you'll remember her famous letter she wrote. | ||
| And she's been a shield for women who have spoken out on this and have been villainized. | ||
| Every time any woman, whether they're in pop music, whether they're in the private sector, the public sector, nurses, whoever they are, and they get in trouble for expressing fact about biology, she comes to defend them. | ||
| And I'd also say, just to James's point, you know... | ||
| You're right. | ||
| This is absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| It's like saying, telling us now, in 10 years' time, they'll go to the Supreme Court to rule that 1 plus 1 does indeed equal 2. That's absolutely how absurd it is. | ||
| We couldn't have fathomed this even 5, maybe 10 years ago. | ||
| It's absolutely ludicrous. | ||
| But I would say the work is not finished. | ||
| I think the Gender Recognition Act, where you can very easily, I might add, obtain a certificate saying you are of the opposite gender. | ||
| Amongst other things, one of the problems it imposes, I think, is the culture that you can actually change your gender. | ||
| I don't actually think that's true. | ||
| I don't think there's such a thing as gender. | ||
| I think there is just biological sex. | ||
| And the big problem is because the truth is that there's something called gender dysphoria. | ||
| Now, to be fair to the Gender Critical Act, and I'd like to know what's going on in America on this subject. | ||
| But it does recognise gender dysphoria as an issue. | ||
| But if we can say, yes, there is such thing as gender dysphoria, but that doesn't mean you can change your sex. | ||
| That sentence hasn't really been said explicitly. | ||
| We haven't quite got there. | ||
| I'd say there's some work to do. | ||
| So, James, to that point, maybe that's the easiest way to explain it, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me that they would never accept that, that you would just say, okay, there's biological differences, and then you can just express your gender identity however the hell you want, but it doesn't change the scientific reality. | ||
| But they won't go for that, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what you've been talking about for years. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And in particular, they're not going to go for the idea that, you know, they already have, we all, everybody, whether you wanted to or not, in, say, 1972, all had the freedom to express your so-called gender identity or... | ||
| gender stereotypes or whatever, however you wanted to. | ||
| You could be a guy with long hair. | ||
| Many people in the 1970s did. | ||
| You could do, you could present as feminine, you could present as | ||
|
unidentified
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David Bowie, Mick Jagger, anyone could do it. | |
| Nobody cared. | ||
| It was cool. | ||
| What wasn't there was the state backing up. | ||
| The ability to force people to acknowledge it. | ||
| And so this will not be satisfactory for them. | ||
| They aren't actually concerned as much as they talk about freedoms and this and that and liberation is the word they use. | ||
| They're not actually concerned with that. | ||
| They are subscribed to a view of the world, and here's where we'll get deep for a second, called social constructivism. | ||
| Everybody's heard this. | ||
| Gender is a social construct. | ||
| That's kind of where people like you and I, Dave, kind of cut our teeth against this madness 10 years ago. | ||
| Gender is a social construct. | ||
| They believe in social constructivism, which means that the society constructs what is true and what is false. | ||
| And so what society endorses and reifies through law is what actually matters. | ||
| So this will absolutely be unacceptable to them. | ||
| They will actually, before long, I'm pretty sure somebody will come out and call this a genocide because their entire social constructivist world has now had its knees cut out from underneath it, and this will be a huge problem for them. | ||
| But I agree with Winston that this is a starting place, but in fact... | ||
| The fact that there is still a Gender Recognition Act, the name just cracks me up. | ||
| It's so formal and sterile. | ||
| It's like gender-affirming care. | ||
| It's the same kind of dystopian language. | ||
| But James, let me jump in for a sec, because this is a perfect segue, which is that as this thing kind of corrects itself, it also goes backwards at the exact same time. | ||
| Winston, here's your Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and he's a little confused over who has a cervix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To say only women have a cervix. | |
| Well, it is something that shouldn't be said. | ||
| It is not right. | ||
| But Andrew, I don't think that... | ||
| So Rosie Duffield should not have said that. | ||
| Can you explain to people watching why she should not have said that? | ||
| Well, Andrew, I don't think that we can just go through various things that people have said. | ||
| Rosie Duffield, I spoke to Rosie earlier this week and told her that conference was a safe place for her to come, and it is a safe place for her. | ||
| There's something particularly perverse about that, I think, Winston, because he said it's something that shouldn't be said. | ||
| He didn't say men don't have cervixes. | ||
| He said it's something that shouldn't be said. | ||
| That is as dystopian as it gets. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And he's not the only one in the Labour Party to express such opinions. | ||
| Others have been more explicit to say women can have penises, including foreign... | ||
| Minister David Lamet. | ||
| I would say with Sir Keir Starmer, our Prime Minister, in that video, and there's been other ones similar like this, I think he's actually said worse things than that. | ||
| And I would also note that since then, he's come back towards the rational. | ||
| But in that moment, one of two things. | ||
| Either he's lying and he knows that a man can't be a woman, or he's not lying and he actually is... | ||
| If he's not lying, he's either confused about what it is, And if that's the case, he shouldn't be running the country. | ||
| If you can't deal with the basic concept of male and female, then the idea of the complexities of running a nation seems just absurd. | ||
| But it's also the case that if he is lying, and either because he's an ideologue or otherwise, he, again, is not someone who should be trusted running a country. | ||
| Is that the fundamental point with all of the woke stuff, James? | ||
| Like, if you basically can't... | ||
| Affirmatively say that men don't have cervix is like, how the hell are you supposed to negotiate a peace deal or have sound economic policy or quite literally anything else? | ||
| I mean, I would agree that that's a concern, but it's like you said, this is a perfect pivot, you said, because it highlights that idea of social constructivism. | ||
| And then his weaselly language, Starmer's weaselly language made that abundantly clear. | ||
| He didn't acknowledge what is or is not about the world. | ||
| He said what should and shouldn't be said, because the social constructivist view is that which we... | ||
| What reality actually is, is what we are willing to acknowledge and not acknowledge. | ||
| So reality is determined by our perceptions, which are contoured by what we believe should and shouldn't or enforce should and shouldn't be recognized, said or spoken about or written about. | ||
| And so it's kind of way deeper than, I mean, I agree with Winston. | ||
| If you're struggling with male and female, the complexities of the country are maybe out of your grasp. | ||
| However... He's not struggling with male and female. | ||
| He's actually adopted another—I mean, he could just be a politician lying, but he's expressing the views of a worldview, a complete worldview that does not allow you to negotiate with reality. | ||
| It only allows you to negotiate with constructions and political activity. | ||
| So it's far more dangerous than somebody who literally just can't figure out, you know, like you said, that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a great point. | ||
| Now, here in America, we've got a Secretary of Education who knows what's what. | ||
|
unidentified
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Madam Secretary, I do want to put up Title IX because it seems like that's the foundation of your argument here. | |
| Just as a reminder, for anyone I know, my own mother was a massive beneficiary of Title IX. | ||
| I'm lucky to be young enough that that had been settled by the time... | ||
| I went to school. | ||
| It says, no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. | ||
| So, can you explain why you think transgender athletes amounts to sex discrimination under this title? | ||
| I think there are two sexes. | ||
| There's male and female. | ||
| And so transgender doesn't have a play in this. | ||
| You're born a boy, you're a boy, you're born a girl, you're a girl. | ||
| And even with puberty, blocking hormones, etc., males are still stronger. | ||
| Their structure is different. | ||
| They can perform very differently in competition. | ||
| And we have to respect and understand that and give women the rights that they have under this Title IX. | ||
| Now Winston, before I have you chime in, I was thinking, I was watching that, and I was going, well, how did she become so clear on this issue? | ||
| How is it possible she knows that men and women are different? | ||
| And then we found this video, and I think this is pretty much when she figured it out. | ||
|
unidentified
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*laughter* | |
| Wait, which one of those two is the woman? | ||
| You know, when you get pile-drived by a 350-pound man, you suddenly go, my genitals do match! | ||
| I love it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love that America has just turned into 90s WWF attitude. | |
| Like, that's reality now. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| James, do you have anything to add, or should we move on? | ||
| We maybe should just move on. | ||
| I mean, she had a point, right? | ||
| So Linda McMahon had a point. | ||
| Yeah, I guess just bravo, Linda McMahon. | ||
| You know the difference between boys and girls. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
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| Okay, so the other big thing that happened over the last couple weeks, it wasn't revealed until earlier this week, but it happened actually about two weeks ago, was that Bill Maher, a man that we all know, the man who's been, I would say, the standard bearer for American classical liberalism for the last three decades, | ||
| he met... | ||
| With Donald Trump, a man who he's been making fun of, and Trump's been making fun of him for decades at this point, Bill Maher, and that's my buddy Chuck LaBella, who does some work with Bill. | ||
| Obviously, that's Trump and Dana White from the UFC. | ||
| Winston, what was your take on just seeing people who seemingly are supposed to hate each other or who have been at odds forever breaking bread? | ||
| It feels like we're back to normal. | ||
| I mean, I feel like the last 10, 15 years where you're not allowed to talk to people you disagree with, Yeah. | ||
| James... That's pretty much your life, actually, for the last 10 years. | ||
| You went from talk—well, I don't want to say only talking to liberals, but you basically for the last 10 years have been welcomed into conservative circles, into religious circles, a group of people, generally, who you would think you'd be at odds with, and they've shown you a lot of love and warmth and everything else. | ||
| So this must be rather heartwarming for you, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, it's charming. | ||
| I'm confused given kind of broader context in the world right now. | ||
| Like, so, you know, Bill Maher says that he met with Trump. | ||
| We see the pictures. | ||
| We know he met with Trump and he's got this kind of different opinion of the guy because he got, you know, firsthand experience. | ||
| But just the other day on Joe Rogan, we learned that having firsthand experience of a thing is not what you're supposed to have. | ||
| And I had the firsthand experience of, you know, being welcomed by Christians and conservatives. | ||
| But then I'm... | ||
| Maybe I should have just watched it on YouTube. | ||
| I don't know what's going on in the world anymore, except that I do, which is that I'm starting to get afraid that the thing that Winston just said, which is this weird division thing, is not normal. | ||
| That you don't talk to people that you disagree with. | ||
| You know, that's not normal. | ||
| We should be talking with people. | ||
| We should be getting to know people. | ||
| We should actually be humanizing each other is threatening to be lost in yet another way. | ||
| So, you know, I'm a little bit concerned about some of these things. | ||
| So I'm a little bit confused. | ||
| But no, this is good. | ||
| I would like to see. | ||
| I've noticed and heard so many different people that have had the opportunity to meet President Trump. | ||
| come away completely flabbergasted that he exactly like Bill Maher said is nothing like what the media portray him to be. | ||
| And the Trump derangement syndrome media psyops is probably, you know, one of the top five kind of most insane psychologetic. | ||
| Psychological operations we've seen in our lifetimes maybe that's ever taken place. | ||
| COVID, of course, is up there too. | ||
| And it's nice to see that we're now at the point where the breakthrough against that is happening and people are sitting down and starting to talk to one another and actually find out for themselves. | ||
| Yeah. And by the way, as my audience knows, I literally sat in the chair at Club Random with Bill about three years ago and said, I changed with Trump the day that I met him. | ||
| Thus, he then now, three years later, says the exact same thing. | ||
| And Winston, you sat in that—well, technically, you were in a different chair, same studio. | ||
| But you sat down with Bill about a week ago, and here you guys are talking about classical liberalism and sort of— The roots of it and which way do we go, people? | ||
| You get a certain amount of cult followers for anything and then the true believers never die. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people would say right now the Democratic Party is still in that mode, which is going to render them possibly an irrelevant party if they don't change. | ||
| What would you like to see from the Democrats going forward? | ||
| Much more centrism, much more get rid of the woke baggage, you know. | ||
| Old school liberal is what I usually describe myself as. | ||
| But that's very often the opposite of woke. | ||
| Woke would like people to believe that there's some sort of an extension of liberalism, but they're not. | ||
| They're usually something that's quite opposite. | ||
| Liberalism was we should have a colorblind society and not see race at all. | ||
| That's not what the woke believe. | ||
| They're the opposite. | ||
| Let's put race at the front of everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. Oppressor and oppressed, sacred, make a sacred the oppressed. | |
| So, Winston, I know everyone watching this gets that. | ||
| Woke is the opposite of liberalism. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Now, my position has been for a while that those liberals, those moderate classical liberals, whatever you want to call them, old school liberals, they should be on the more moderate wing of the Republican Party. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That's Tulsi, that's Bobby, etc., etc. | ||
| What Bill is still sort of saying, although you guys tape that before or after he met with Trump? | ||
| After. After he met with Trump. | ||
| So he hasn't said he's supporting Trump. | ||
| He's just kind of in the ballpark, let's say. | ||
| I think his position still would be, oh, the liberals, I mean, he basically said it there, the liberals should still be trying to retake the Democrat Party from the crazies. | ||
| Do you have a particular opinion on that? | ||
| Just to be clear, he's very much not supporting Trump. | ||
| He told me, and I think he also made it expressly clear in his monologue on Real Time. | ||
| That he, to Trump's face, expressed his concerns, his concerns about the deportations, his concerns about free speech under the Trump regime. | ||
| He's very much not a supporter of Trump 2.0, let alone Trump 1.0. | ||
| He was right absolutely about two things, not only what you said there about liberalism and woke being opposites, but he's also right about the cult of... | ||
| And this actually just pertains to what we were previously discussing. | ||
| It was the sagacious Thomas Jefferson who said, if everyone thinks the same, no one is thinking. | ||
| And that also goes to the point that we should be speaking, if we are thinking the same, we're basically in a cult. | ||
| I think that he would... | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| I mean, where the Democrats are right now seems a long way from... | ||
| But I don't think it's out the question that some of the liberals, like you say, who are at the moment supporting Trump might move back to the Democrat Party. | ||
| I think sensible people like Tulsi, like RFK, liberals who are at the moment, let's put it this way, liberals are now aligning with Trump because the Democrats and the progressives... | ||
| Are not liberal in any way, sense or shape. | ||
| This is actually what Frederick Hyatt described in his essay, Why I'm Not a Conservative. | ||
| And he describes, you know, we have the famous horseshoe concept of the difference between left and right wing. | ||
| But he says you have a line between conservatives and progressives and the liberals will swing whichever way is... | ||
| The least totalitarian and happens to be aligning with liberalism. | ||
| When I spoke to Bill, we both reminisced about how in the 90s it was Tipper Gore, who although was the wife of Al Gore, of course a Democrat, it was a conservative movement to censor artist rappers. | ||
| And it could be the case that in 10 years' time, the conservative swing... | ||
| Too far that way. | ||
| In politics, things can change quicker than you might remember. | ||
| Yeah. Look, it was the conservatives when I was a kid. | ||
| It was the conservative Republicans going after Mortal Kombat, literally going after video games. | ||
| So, James, do you think that this thing, whether Bill is fully part of it or not, but this thing that somewhat, I would say, represents the three of us, do you think it can hold within the MAGA movement? | ||
| And we'll get to what you referenced, by the way. | ||
| You referenced something on Rogan. | ||
| We'll get to that at the end of the show also, which is, I would say, ancillarily connected to this. | ||
| Yeah, it's under threat for sure, but I think that it's time for a resurgence. | ||
| I think about this question actually really deeply, and I don't know. | ||
| I kind of think the word liberal is like completely dead. | ||
| It's been abused by Marxists and progressives co-opting it and claiming it for themselves and misusing it. | ||
| It's been abused by conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, for example, with a huge microphone, big famous golden microphone, who... | ||
| Did not bother to distinguish between leftists and liberals whatsoever. | ||
| And I think it's just kind of lost. | ||
| It's not that they don't understand the word. | ||
| There's too much smoke in the air. | ||
| Nobody can understand the word anymore. | ||
| But there are certain principles, I think, that... | ||
| We need to be revitalized. | ||
| We need to be asking ourselves, what is it about individual rights? | ||
| What is it about securing? | ||
| Whether it's a right to due process, which is in the news right now, whether it's a right to own and use your own property as you will, whether it's your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which is also the use of your property. | ||
| We've really got to look at what that... | ||
| Because one of the big fracture lines in MAGA right now, if you were to ask me, or in the broader conservative movement, is does it want to be a liberty movement or does it want to be a virtue, like a compelled virtue movement, where there are going to be authorities and powers who tell you what the correct morals and values are because they believe society's gone so degenerate that they can't govern themselves and therefore have to be governed in those personal domains. | ||
| The question you asked me, Dave, is an open question. | ||
| It's not clear to me that the liberty movement is going to come out on top. | ||
| But if we don't have people, including Bill Maher and people such as ourselves and others, speaking up and articulating the case for whether it's common sense, whether it's... | ||
| Whether it's the principle of universalism, whether it's the principle of, Christians call it imago dei, but in essence we are all equal in the creation of our Creator. | ||
| If we don't start advocating for these principles, then we have a major problem coming on our hands because there is a concerted effort to replace that with enforced virtue, which is what the woke did. | ||
| If you want to call them woke right, or if you just want to call them the radical right, or the alt-right, or the Christian nationalist right, whatever you want to call them, they want to enforce morality too, and it's an invitation to the same kinds of problems. | ||
| And it's a real threat right now. | ||
| Yeah, and that actually perfectly illustrates the point you were making, Winston, that Hayek made, so the liberals could actually bounce back and forth in terms of where they vote, because authoritarianism can come from either side. | ||
| Let's talk about Lean for a minute, and then we'll get to some of the things that Trump is doing, and we'll discuss. | ||
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| All right, so of course, one of the big fights that Trump has picked is with Harvard, and Harvard somehow has become, I would say, ground zero or the epicenter for much of the woke lunacy. | ||
| Here's White House spokeswoman Caroline Levitt on Trump cutting a cool two-bill in federal funding from Harvard. | ||
| The president at that time made it clear to the American public he was not going to tolerate illegal harassment and anti-Semitism taking place and violations of federal law. | ||
| So the president made it clear to Harvard. | ||
| Follow federal law. | ||
| No longer break Title VI, which was passed by Congress to ensure no student can be discriminated against on the basis of race. | ||
| And you will receive federal funding. | ||
| Unfortunately, Harvard has not taken the administration's demands seriously. | ||
| All the president is asking, don't break federal law, and then you can have your federal funding. | ||
| I think the president is also begging a good question. | ||
| More than $2 billion out the door to Harvard when they have a more than $50 billion endowment. | ||
| Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already? | ||
| And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave anti-Semitism exists. | ||
| So, Winston, I would take this as an example of Donald Trump defending liberalism. | ||
| When you sat across from Bill in that clip we showed a moment ago, he said liberals used to believe in a colorblind society. | ||
| Harvard has chosen to believe in a discriminatory society where if you are white or Asian or, of course, Jewish, you are going to be discriminated against in admissions and you are going to be elevated if you are black or brown or whatever they want to call it. | ||
| So this is Trump defending liberalism, isn't it? | ||
| Well, it's more explicitly about the problem of anti-Semitism. | ||
| You're right, though. | ||
| In the letter that Trump sent, open letters sent to Harvard, There is talk about DEI hiring that must end. | ||
| Of course, I think it was 2024, maybe it was 2023, the Supreme Court case regarding the Asians being discriminated against at Harvard. | ||
| So they've had a problem with various minorities, not just Jews, although it's clearly high-achieving minorities in this case. | ||
| And I would say, yes, those are liberal principles. | ||
| And not only that, Trump... | ||
| He invokes Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. | ||
| So this is very much old-school Democrat. | ||
| He did the same thing with Colombia, the same principles when he was discussing their funding. | ||
| Where I think it gets a little bit tricky, and maybe where I would find the niggle in the idea that this is entirely liberal. | ||
| Is that he asks in his letter that there be viewpoint diversity. | ||
| Now, the problem with that is how exactly do you have quotas on viewpoint diversity? | ||
| And on what issues do you not have viewpoint diversity? | ||
| For example, just because one would teach Nazi history, one doesn't mean we have to have a pro-Nazi and an anti-Nazi. | ||
| I would hope. | ||
| Everyone would be anti-Nazi. | ||
| So at what point do you no longer need viewpoint diversity? | ||
| And so actually, I'm not sure, and James would be better on this than me when it pertains to education. | ||
| I'm not sure exactly to what level you can be totally liberal when enforcing what should be taught and who should teach it. | ||
| Well, all right. | ||
| So, James, that's a perfect question for you, because in essence, what he's asking is there has to, in some way, there has to be some level of gatekeeping. | ||
| If an institution is going to exist, an institution has to say, these are the parameters in which we exist within. | ||
| So what do you think the proper, if they're going to be completely colorblind as far as admissions, which is, I think, what we all want, then how do you deal with what Winston's talking about there? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And of course, the radicals will always couch what they're doing. | ||
| And I think that's what Obama said in response to this in terms of academic freedom somehow. | ||
| So it is an important, it is kind of the important question. | ||
| And it's to the point of gatekeeping. | ||
| I've become a little bit fond of saying that if you understand why you don't eat dog crap, you understand gatekeeping and why it matters. | ||
| You don't want to let dog, you know, it could be, you know, a pro Nazi or a pro flat earth or whatever department at Harvard. | ||
| It could be a plate full of dog crap. | ||
| You don't want to put bad things in. | ||
| So we do actually have to. | ||
| The point of liberal education, as we kind of generally understand it, isn't, however, this sort of, you know, open the gates, anything goes, anything, you know, | ||
| is necessarily on the table. | ||
| The liberal This goes back to Jonathan Rauch's book, Kindly Inquisitors, which I strongly recommend people read. | ||
| The liberal principle for pursuing knowledge is that there's no final answers, there's no special authority, so every question has to be able to be challenged, but that there are also methodologies by which those challenges are made. | ||
| And so we know that things like flat earth don't come from a rigorous methodology. | ||
| We know that even with more complicated moral issues, like whether or not the Nazis were bad or all bad or evil or something like that, is because – | ||
| We know that certain things are not—we're welcome to say that not all cultures are equal. | ||
| So we don't have to fall into cultural or epistemic relativism just because we want to allow viewpoint diversity. | ||
| It is a question, though. | ||
| Methodologically is how you discern that in the sciences, and methodologically is how you discern that really theologically, but you see a lot of fracturing in churches that way. | ||
| And it should also be in kind of more humanities-oriented fields like history and sociology and so on. | ||
| So you mentioned Barack Obama, and I want to read his tweet in response to what Trump did, because this was just perfect Obama, and I so regret voting for this man twice. | ||
| Harvard has set an example for other higher ed institutions, rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. | ||
| Let's hope other institutions will follow suit. | ||
| I mean, that is a rather extraordinary statement, not only because they have been discriminating against whites and Asians and Jews, obviously, but they've also made it And I should note, I will even read it to you, | ||
| the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which obviously Obama is not a fan of. | ||
| The Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII, prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. | ||
| It also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce these protections. | ||
| And Winston, you pointed out that a year or two ago, the Supreme Court decided the exact same thing as it pertained to college admissions. | ||
| So Barack Obama seems to be completely fine with discriminating against, let's just say, Asians, if nobody else. | ||
| Well, I'd also might add, it seems like he can't read. | ||
| I mean, if he'd read the letter that Trump published, it specifically says... | ||
| That nothing should go against First Amendment rights. | ||
| So Trump and the Trump administration have been absolutely clear that there will be freedom of inquiry there. | ||
| Now, Obama's away with the fairies on this one. | ||
| But I would like to give a possible critique, which I think might be a bit more fair, or maybe you gentlemen will have a riposte for me. | ||
| You can explain this to me. | ||
| It seems to me that why, you know, absolutely obvious that Harvard aren't owed a $2 billion federal funds. | ||
| Why should working Americans pay for an elite bunch of kids for an education? | ||
| Now, I would say that there is some work done at Harvard, exceptional scientific explorations of that sort of genre of work that does actually benefit all of America. | ||
| Actual academic inquiry that a society needs. | ||
| But Harvard has a $50 billion endowment already. | ||
| So the question of why taxpayers should pay even more, I think absolutely Trump is in his right to say, if you don't sort out this racism... | ||
| We saw videos of kids getting beaten at Harvard. | ||
| You'll remember the video that the Jewish kids had to... | ||
| Locked themselves into a library to protect themselves after October 7th. | ||
| That was all happening at Harvard University. | ||
| And we've seen similar things across the country. | ||
| Columbia University might have been just as bad. | ||
| The two are in the running for the worst anti-Semitism we saw in America at the student level. | ||
| But where Trump's going at a new level now is he's saying that Harvard will no longer be IRS tax exempt. | ||
| That goes a bit beyond, I think, just federal funding, because that's not the IRS. | ||
| Them being tax-exempt is completely separate from the federal tax they receive. | ||
| Seems like a different portion or a different... | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It seems like a different category of issue. | ||
| I wonder what your opinions as Americans was on that. | ||
| Well, it's also worth noting that unless Barack Obama is taking sort of the most extreme libertarian position, which is that the 64 Civil Rights Act shouldn't have been signed and you should be allowed to discriminate, which, by the way, I think you can make an intellectually honest argument for. | ||
| You want to open up a business, a coffee shop, and say no black people can come? | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| We'll see how your coffee shop does. | ||
| I think there's an actual argument for that. | ||
| I'm not even taking that argument, but I think you could make it. | ||
| But I'm fairly certain, James, that that's not the argument that Barack Obama is actually trying to make. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| He's making a communist argument, and he actually signals the communist argument with a very subtle little flash, which is the word all. | ||
| He wants it to be an environment where all students can flourish. | ||
| The way communists use the word all in that context is in the equity base. | ||
| What it does is it assumes that under the current situation or current system, not all students are able to get equal protection. | ||
| Therefore, you have to Jimmy the system so that all students are acknowledged. | ||
| You'll see that language everywhere. | ||
| It's very subtle, but he's acknowledging that. | ||
| So he doesn't want that. | ||
| He does not want the Civil Rights Act of 1964 undone because he wants to maintain the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which follows the court decision in 1970. | ||
| Although this is universities of Backey, no, sorry, Backey versus Board of Regents is the one that the previous case overturned. | ||
| This is Griggs versus Duke Power, which set the basis for the equity programs. | ||
| So right now in the United States, there's actually a legal challenge floating out there. | ||
| The civil rights laws are based off of the 14th Amendment and its equal protection clause. | ||
| And I don't know to Winston's question whether or not that applies to nonprofit status, but if it does, then Trump is within his rights. | ||
| And if it doesn't, then he may not be. | ||
| In challenging their nonprofit status. | ||
| So that's a law question I don't know the answer to. | ||
| But the fact is that there's an equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment, but there's no equitable protection clause. | ||
| The following Griggs v. | ||
| Duke Power, the Supreme Court decided that if there is a difference in outcomes statistically, meaning proportionally... | ||
| If you have 100 white applicants and 100 black applicants and a higher percentage of white applicants get in than the black applicants, that's an inequity in admissions, then there must be discrimination hidden somewhere. | ||
| So the Civil Rights Act applies. | ||
| So following that Supreme Court decision in 71, there's been an equity-based misapplication of civil rights law that got codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act into law. | ||
| So now you have two contradictory civil rights acts. | ||
| Obama can appeal to the—he does not want to go to a situation where, say, everybody's allowed to discriminate so long as they advertise their discrimination so that customers can make an informed decision. | ||
| That's not what he's looking for. | ||
| What he's looking for, which is kind of the reasonable argument space that you were talking about under free association and so on that some people on the right sometimes make. | ||
| He is instead signaling that he wants to lean into the equity based and in fact, the highly biased equity based DEI programming that follows the logic that if there is an inequality and outcome in a neutral | ||
| situation, then you have to intervene to create the equality and outcome. | ||
| Which is, of course, what Kamala Harris ran her entire vice presidency on from the very beginning and ran her campaign on in. | ||
| James, watch as a professional host. | ||
| I dumb that down. | ||
| You made a lot of good points using historical facts, but the easiest way for people to understand what you said is that I'm... | ||
| Fairly certain Barack Obama would be all for forcing a baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding, gay marriage, a custom cake, not just one off the shelf, but he also would be for Harvard discriminating. | ||
| And therein lies the rub, right? | ||
| You got to pick one. | ||
| Pick one. | ||
| Winston, do you have something there before we move on? | ||
| Well, yeah, I think that's a very interesting analysis, and I suspect James is completely correct on that, as he usually is. | ||
| The only thing I'd push back on is it seems a stretch to call Obama a communist in any literal sense of the term, right? | ||
| I'm just going to smile mysteriously for a moment. | ||
| He's not a communist. | ||
| He might be a neo-Marxist in the sense of wanting to put in identity groups, treat them differently in the sort of post-modernist way of things. | ||
| But an old school communist? | ||
| No, I don't know if he's an old school communist. | ||
| He's certainly of the neo-Marxist variety that we deal with in the day-to-day. | ||
| Another video that's been going around this week of Obama, I don't know if you guys saw it, is him from 1990 participating in the Harvard protest to support... | ||
| Derek Bell, who was the founder of Critical Race Theory. | ||
| And it was a similar incident to what we've been seeing on college campuses today, but in 1990, so nobody really knew what it was. | ||
| And so there's Barack Obama, a young man, young activist trained in the Chicago School of Marxist Activism by the Weather Underground activists, standing there in proud and open support over some critical race theory-based grievance that Derek Bell had made. | ||
| I forget the exact detail. | ||
| and doing one of these demonstrations, one of these communist direct actions. | ||
| But he is of the neo-Marxist sort. | ||
| He is not of the... | ||
| I don't think he's what Herbert Marcuse would refer to as a communist of strict obedience. | ||
| I would say that it's of the neo-Marxist sort, but I don't really distinguish between these things anymore because I don't think they're meaningfully different. | ||
| Let me throw to one other clip on this, because on CNN, you know, we usually show these clips of Scott Jennings, who basically is the one sane guy they put on these panel shows, but they've got another guy who appears every now and again. | ||
| His name is Shermichael Singleton. | ||
| I suppose he either leans right or is a conservative, something to that effect. | ||
| Here he is talking about how just out of control these... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think from my perspective as a conservative, there really is a real battle going on in the country right now between liberalism, conservatism, and which of the two ideologies will lead the country into the next 50 to 100 years, particularly as we look at China and what their advancements and developments are in terms of usurping U.S. lead globally. | |
| And I am not certain that every single liberal institution... | ||
| That's an Ivy League. | ||
| I don't think they've really done enough to have intellectual diversity of thought on a litany of topics. | ||
| I mean, these places are really breeding grounds for some of the most abhorrent views, in my personal opinion. | ||
| But don't you think that the race against China is not being fought on the grounds of domestic political discourse? | ||
| Oh, I would disagree with that, Abby. | ||
| It's in the scientific labs. | ||
| It's in the AI labs. | ||
| It's in the research. | ||
| No, no, I would disagree. | ||
| I think culture matters. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I get that. | ||
| I think customs of behavior matter. | ||
| I think norms matter. | ||
| All of those things matter in terms of the health of a society. | ||
| China is going to lap us, economically and technologically. | ||
| It is not going to be because there are five more Republicans at Harvard. | ||
| Man, first of all, I just want to say, you don't have to comment if you want, Abby Martens seems to me the most unimpressive person on all of television. | ||
| There's just nothing going on there. | ||
| She doesn't understand what culture is. | ||
| Okay, that aside. | ||
| Winston. It's good that this is finally, like, it would have been nice if we were hearing that sort of thing 10 years ago. | ||
| A bunch of us were talking about it online. | ||
| The fact that it has finally bubbled up to CNN and they're addressing what the real problems are, it is, like, better late than never, right? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| And I would say there's a truth in what she's saying is that China will lap us on technology. | ||
| And so I'm not sure quite what she said. | ||
| What issue did you take with what she said? | ||
| Well, I meant that more as a general thing with her. | ||
| I just think there's just not a lot going on behind the eyes. | ||
| But she's ignoring the cultural part. | ||
| Because she's basically saying, well, don't worry, we can still do it as far as science and whatever, but just ignore the cultural part. | ||
| But if we raise, I think James can probably speak to this quite well, if we raise two generations of kids that don't know where their genitals come from and think that the country's racist and that everyone before them was an evil person at the fundamental backing, you know, the fundamental founding of the country was awful, that... | ||
| That might actually lead China to the future more than us also. | ||
| I have much more deep concerns. | ||
| Oh, sorry, Winston. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Well, I absolutely agree on that. | ||
| I would say it's not just America. | ||
| It's also European countries as well. | ||
| We've lost our confidence. | ||
| And if you look at the polling on the younger generation, whether they would fight for their country, if it would be invaded, obviously this doesn't apply to Israel, but the rest of the Western countries. | ||
| Very much. | ||
| There's a loss of confidence. | ||
| There's a self-hatred. | ||
| We think we're evildoers. | ||
| And it's even worse in Europe, whereas in Europe, for some reason, the lesson after World War II is that all nationalism is bad instead of learning that German nationalism was particularly bad. | ||
| America didn't quite learn that lesson because it was American nationalism that won the war. | ||
| But there's just this self-flagellation that goes on eternally, and I think it's going to play out for a very disturbing... | ||
| 40, 50 years ahead of us. | ||
| James, the better late than never part of this, does it just make you rip your hair out or are you just like, all right, fine, they did it. | ||
| Okay, welcome to the party, pal. | ||
| Yeah, I'm kind of there. | ||
| I so gave up on these people so long ago that it's like, okay, they're doing it. | ||
| Just to address, I'm glad Winston said what he said too, because where he's talking about a generation or two generations, as you said, Dave, of young people who won't fight for their country, that's actually what they're teaching at schools like Harvard. | ||
| So it does matter that you get these critical theories out or that you at least bring in a counterpoint to those critical theories that can re-stimulate, whether it's nationalism or whether it's just... | ||
| Not hating yourself and your country and everything about it because China will take over or any other country will take over the United States or Britain or whatever if nobody there is willing to defend it. | ||
| More than that, if you have a completely divided political populace because of these very polarizing political issues being seeded through the ivies. | ||
| You are not going to be in a position to be able to solve actual problems or advance anything. | ||
| So China benefits strongly. | ||
| This is why they spend $16 billion a year on political warfare against the United States from their military budget. | ||
| They benefit greatly from a divided and fractured United States. | ||
| They can't agree on things or build things together. | ||
| And then finally, we've seen in country after country, I was just in New Zealand, and there's a huge political debate there about it. | ||
| They call it Mauturanga Maori there, which means Maori ways of knowing. | ||
| And whether or not that should be considered equivalent to Western science, we saw that happen. | ||
| The woke will take over the sciences. | ||
| The AI lab is only safe so long as the AI department doesn't have a Me Too. | ||
| And so her point is like wonderful in the kind of detached abstract. | ||
| Right. World where the woke aren't taking everything over and causing huge divisions and splits. | ||
| By the way, it should be noted, guys, do you know where she went to college? | ||
| You'll never guess. | ||
| Come on, guess. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| Harvard or Columbia. | ||
| Harvard. Yeah, she went to Harvard. | ||
| All right, we're going to talk about Rumble Premium for a minute, and then Chicks in Space! | ||
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| All right, they sent a couple chicks to space. | ||
| It was very exciting. | ||
| They were up there for four minutes. | ||
| Didn't do much but check their hair, but all right, here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Got it? | |
| One, two, three. | ||
| Taking up space! | ||
| Woo! It's okay. | ||
| Please lean up there. | ||
| And you will see a puff of smoke when it touches down. | ||
| A puff of dust. | ||
| That's normal. | ||
| A puff of dust, last milliseconds. | ||
| Air cushion that will kick up the dust. | ||
| It's a very soft, soft landing despite the sporty perception. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Guys, I love space. | ||
| It's one of my favorite places. | ||
| All my favorite movies take place in space. | ||
| But these women had no training. | ||
| The giggling, the hair, the makeup. | ||
| To me, this was very backwards if you want people to think that women are qualified to do these things. | ||
| Which, of course, there are qualified women doing these things. | ||
| We've sent women into space before. | ||
| James, this is Feminism 101, isn't it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I saw her birth out that window, though, so this is fake news as hell. | ||
| What I will say, I hate when we prove the flat earthers wrong. | ||
| When I was in New Zealand, I looked at the moon up through a camera, and it was upside down, exactly like a round earth would be. | ||
| Can you believe this? | ||
| No, so for me, yeah, Feminism 101, sure. | ||
| Send up a bunch of... | ||
| Token icons and then get mad if anybody complains about it. | ||
| And the reason, of course, that people are complaining about this is, you know, I was talking to my wife about this last night. | ||
| I was like, a lot of people are really upset about these women going to space. | ||
| And she's like, well, why? | ||
| Probably because they're jealous because they want to go to space. | ||
| I was like, well, it's not just that they're jealous because they want to go to space. | ||
| It's that if they would have chosen some science enthusiast kid who has cancer and this university professor who did this and this engineer who built that and whatever, all these people who did things that are of great note. | ||
| As opposed to, say, Katy Perry. | ||
| And sent them to space. | ||
| People have been like, I understand why those people got chosen to get to go to do this really cool thing. | ||
| So the jealousy, the envy wouldn't be there. | ||
| But instead, they sent a bunch of bimbos. | ||
| And then, yay feminism. | ||
| Like, it's just, they made it fake. | ||
| And so nobody's happy about it. | ||
| Winston, before I get your take, here's Gayle King on her ride. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't like that people are calling it a ride. | |
| You never see a man, a male astronaut, who's going up in space and they say,"Oh, he took a ride." We actually duplicated the route that Alan Shepard did. | ||
| That's why this particular capsule is called the New Shepard. | ||
| We duplicated that route. | ||
| No one said he took that ride. | ||
| It's always referred to as a flight or a journey. | ||
| So I feel that that's a little disrespectful to what the mission was and what the work that Blue Origin does. | ||
| We use space technology all the time, whether it's your GPS, whether it's your satellite. | ||
| That doesn't just happen. | ||
| Every time a flight goes up, they get some type of information. | ||
| Two of the astronauts, I still have a hard time calling myself an astronaut, but two of the astronauts... | ||
| Winston, we did a little checking. | ||
| Alan Shepard trained for his first mission for over a decade. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think this might have set women's rights back maybe 50 years. | ||
| And I initially thought it was funny, but the more I think about it, the less funny it is. | ||
| Firstly, they never, as she says, call it a flight or a ride. | ||
| Normally, we call it a mission. | ||
| And the reason why this has not been called a mission is because there's no way can this be described as a mission. | ||
| But the real reason why this has been so damaging to women, apart from all the shrieking and insufferable sounds and tones we heard coming from the shuttle, the capsule, whatever it might be called, is that they were quite literally in space for 11 minutes. | ||
| And it seems that they spent all of that 11 minutes on Instagram. | ||
| If you go to space... | ||
| I would be in awe, gobsmacked. | ||
| I'd be out the window looking at everything. | ||
| Watch them when they go there. | ||
| They're literally on Instagram. | ||
| I mean, it's just so... | ||
| There's so many great women in the world and that they sent... | ||
| And maybe I did actually, to be fair to some, one of them I think is a trained astronaut of some sort and worked for NASA. | ||
| It's so embarrassing, their behavior, that I think it does a real disfavor to the brilliant women in the world. | ||
| Well, you sound like somebody who obviously never used the sepia filter on Instagram in space. | ||
| Guys, I do want to do one other thing, which we just added before we started recording with you guys, because our friend Constantine Kissin from the Triggernometry podcast, he put up on Substack an article about something that's been kind of brewing online, and I'm just going to read you one line of it, and I want your take. | ||
| Podcastistan is a place where people scold the mainstream media for failing to live up to their standards. | ||
| And this was to the backdrop of a Douglas Murray-Dave Smith debate, largely about Israel, on Rogan's podcast. | ||
| And I've been thinking a lot about this, because people are putting aside even the specifics of the debate, and you guys are welcome to talk about whatever you want, obviously. | ||
| As we watch mainstream collapse and the gatekeeping that you were talking about earlier, James, and most people watching this, I think, agree that gatekeeping has been terrible, especially COVID, I think, blew apart so many doors for people that now they're questioning everything. | ||
| And you've got people thinking that Winston Churchill was the bad guy in World War II and somehow Hitler was good. | ||
| And just like the litany of things that we've upended. | ||
| We are finding ourselves in a weird place where everyone's just going off to their corner to find truth. | ||
| I do the best I can on this show to tell people what I think. | ||
| I'm going to have some blind spots and make mistakes every now and again. | ||
| But as we whirl further into podcastistan, as Constantine is talking about, is this like... | ||
| In some sense, the most dangerous thing that a modern society can be in where we're just going to all define truth for ourselves, and in some ways we have to blame the previous gatekeepers because they did not do a good enough job gatekeeping correctly. | ||
| If I'm framing this correctly, James, feel free to clean that up if you don't agree with the premise. | ||
| No, no, you're not wrong. | ||
| So the social constructivism I talked about earlier is relevant, but also what you're witnessing is postmodernism. | ||
| What he's actually putting his finger on is That it has gone postmodern. | ||
| This is the postmodern condition, and everything that went along with postmodernism on the left that sucked is going to come here that also sucks. | ||
| But the social constructivist viewpoint, which, by the way, critical constructivism is the formal academic name for what we call woke. | ||
| The social constructivist viewpoint is that there's a they out there, the critical constructivist, because you've got to be critical theory of it. | ||
| There's a they out there who have... | ||
| Gatecapped the institutions so that their knowledges are considered valid and nobody else's outside knowledges are considered valid. | ||
| Therefore, outsider knowledge that challenges the existing establishment is considered more valid. | ||
| And so that's actually also what he's touching on. | ||
| So this is why these people qualify under a brand name like Woke Right, because most of them identify on the right. | ||
| They push so-called right-wing values, and they've adopted a left-wing epistemology. | ||
| I said that in long form with Winston on his podcast when we were at ARC together and talked about this same. | ||
| So they value outsider knowledge that supports a prevailing anti-establishment narrative, aka a critical theory. | ||
| And so this is what we're actually seeing. | ||
| And of course, Constantine has, I envious here, a way with words that is sometimes just positively magical. | ||
| And he's done it extremely well there. | ||
| I'm a little frustrated with my friend Douglas from that debate because the word that didn't come up from the journalist that should have come up. | ||
| It's not about expertise in that particular discussion they had. | ||
| It is about whether or not due diligence has been done before reporting is being brought to the surface. | ||
| And Douglas's point was... | ||
| I've done due diligence before I wrote my book and you haven't done due diligence for the amount you talk about this. | ||
| And due diligence is a concept that hasn't fallen out of view. | ||
| Like you looked up the Alan Shepard stuff that was doing some due diligence on this. | ||
| You vet all of the clips that you show. | ||
| That's doing due diligence before you put together your show. | ||
| That's actually a high standard of journalistic integrity. | ||
| It's not present in podcastistan. | ||
| Constantine kind of has poked that bear and revealed they don't like having that mirror held up to their face, but that's because they're postmodern and don't have anything else. | ||
| So, Winston, I know that this... | ||
| Issue is near and dear to you, and we talked about it on your podcast a couple weeks ago as well. | ||
| Do you think part of the problem here is that it's something that I reference all the time that Jordan Peterson brought up years ago, that the left never knows when to gatekeep the left, right? | ||
| They never know when they've gone too far. | ||
| And now we're seeing a version of that on the right for the reasons that James just put out there. | ||
| The gatekeepers were so bad, again, I think particularly during COVID. | ||
| I think had COVID not gone so crazy, a lot of this doesn't happen. | ||
| But now everyone's willing to throw their- Well, I would say I'm so happy that the likes of both of you gentlemen, as well as Constantine, as well as Douglas Murray, are being very quick to call out when the right are going too far. | ||
| They're making no hesitation, which is not something that we can say about the left and how the woke cult took over the Democrat Party and much else. | ||
| Um, so I don't think that the, the, uh, behavior on, on this side of the fence is, is quite comparable. | ||
| I'm not sure that this is saying anything new, but perhaps rephrasing what Constantine is observing, which is that I think why I started watching shows like yours, Dave, and others is because I lost faith in the mainstream media because... | ||
| I knew for a fact that they were at best only showing half of the story and at worst intentionally manipulating what was really going on. | ||
| Who could forget the famous Chiron mainly peaceful protests? | ||
| What is happening is an equally bad opposite, which is that... | ||
| The podcaster Stan, as Konstantin calls it, is now only showing half the story. | ||
| And a good example of this, and I would say on a personal level, Joe Rogan is a very lovely man. | ||
| It's certainly my interactions with him. | ||
| But it is the case that he's had on his show a lot of pro or rather anti-Israel voices, a lot of anti-Ukraine voices, which is not itself a problem. | ||
| But the problem is they're not commensurate with the opposite side being heard at all. | ||
| So you're getting one side. | ||
| And I would even say, you know, Douglas Murray goes on to the show. | ||
| Dave Smith was on the week before. | ||
| When Douglas goes on, oh, we need to invite Dave Smith on to just make sure everything you say is, you know, | ||
| So there's his due diligence there. | ||
| So the due diligence maybe is only being applied. | ||
| To one side of things. | ||
| Now, he might come back and say, well, it's not his responsibility to show all sides. | ||
| It's his show. | ||
| He can do whatever he wants. | ||
| And he's actually right. | ||
| He can do whatever he wants. | ||
| But it is the case that his show is, I think, the biggest in the world still. | ||
| It has been at points. | ||
| And if it's not, it's up in the top five. | ||
| He has an enormous influence. | ||
| And so if he's not going to bring on voices to challenge people like Daryl Cooper, who is saying, You know, Churchill was the chief villain in World War II. | ||
| In fact, when Daryl Cooper went on Joe's show, he said, you've got to take Mein Kampf with a pinch of salt, for which he got no pushback. | ||
| And I'm sorry. | ||
| That, for me, was the moment where I was like, actually, this has gone too far. | ||
| So, yeah, I think that the duty is on us now to speak up about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would just add, or go ahead, James, and then I'll... | |
| Yeah, can I do the boil-down trick you did? | ||
| So I'll take all this wonderful brilliance of Winston that he just gave us. | ||
| But it's my dog crap analogy with gatekeeping, right? | ||
| So we know not to eat dog crap, but we also know that the, like, Ask Maha is pretty wild over there. | ||
| Maha understands, make America healthy again, if you don't know what I'm referring to, understands that, you know, the gatekeepers at the FDA... | ||
| I've not been doing their job right, right? | ||
| They're letting all kinds of like fun chemicals. | ||
| I think Chick-fil-A has like aluminum and sugar or something in the breading. | ||
| I don't know, something crazy. | ||
| All these different things have been allowed, food additives and so on. | ||
| So the question is, what do you do with this, right? | ||
| Is it, hey, you know, they've been lying to us about what's in our food, so let's eat dog crap because anything goes. | ||
| Or is it maybe we need a more responsible regulatory agency that's making sure that all this crap isn't coming through. | ||
| Very much reminiscent of that, and what podcastistan represents is, yeah, we've been betrayed by our institutions for not doing their proper role, and therefore, let's just throw caution to the wind, is kind of what Constantine's saying, | ||
| when it should be, in fact, what we need is to reassert journalistic integrity and rigor to the greatest degree possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gentlemen, I guess our work is cut out for us. | |
| I'll make one other observation, if I may. | ||
| For years, we've been told that the right wing is Nazis and Trump's a neo-Nazi and all of this and fascist this and fascist that. | ||
| But now that there's actual Nazi apologia coming out of certain parts of the right wing, I don't hear anything about it from the left. | ||
| It's weird, isn't it? | ||
| Right. We were all Nazis when we weren't Nazis. | ||
| Now there's a couple kind of Nazis and nobody's a Nazi. | ||
| Or the lefties are the ones etching the swastikas on the Teslas. | ||
| I don't always wear tinfoil, but if I was, I would say they're giving us enough rope to hang ourselves. | ||
| Winston, what does one do in the UK over the weekend? | ||
| Well, I'm off to France, actually. | ||
| So on the weekend, one gets out of the UK. | ||
| And James, what does one do in Tennessee on the weekend? | ||
| Go out in the sun and work in the yard. | ||
| It's good, old-fashioned, whatever. | ||
| Build a fire, have a beer. | ||
| Basically what I'm doing, but with tequila. | ||
| Gentlemen, this was an absolute pleasure. | ||
| You're welcome back anytime. | ||
| Good seeing you guys. | ||
| No post-game show because it's Friday. | ||
| Thank everybody for watching, and we'll see you on Monday. |
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