May 16, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:19:59
Participants
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unidentified
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I don't think it is. | |
| Why not? | ||
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unidentified
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I worry that the norms at the center All right, people, I'm Dave Rubin. | |
| This is The Rubin Report, and we've got a live Friday roundtable extravaganza before you. | ||
| Before I intro the guest, though, I do have to note that I just got back from three days in Austin, Texas, as you probably saw online, and I ate barbecue three straight days, so I just don't know what you're going to get out of me today. | ||
| It was a lot of barbecue sauce. | ||
| It might have slowed me down a little bit, but I have... | ||
| Good faith that my guests will carry it if I start struggling. | ||
| First up, we've got CNN contributor Shermichael Singleton. | ||
| Yes, he's making his Rubin Report debut, and nobody from CNN ever responds to my email, so this is very exciting. | ||
| And then old Rubin Report veteran sports broadcaster and conservative influencer Emily Austin. | ||
| Shermichael, Emily, good to see you guys. | ||
| Veteran, I like it. | ||
| You're OG at this point. | ||
| Once you're in for a year, you are OG. | ||
| Sure, Michael, this is your first appearance. | ||
| Could be your last appearance. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But you responded. | ||
| You responded. | ||
| So already I feel we've broken bread here in some ways. | ||
| I mean, Dave, it will not be my last appearance unless you guys don't invite me back. | ||
| Hopefully this will be the first of many to come. | ||
| I'm ecstatic to be here. | ||
| I've been a big fan of yours for years and years and years. | ||
| And so hopefully I impress your audience enough where you guys say we got to have Shermichael back. | ||
| All right, let's see what happens. | ||
| We're going to dive into, obviously, the big story breaking right now is this craziness around former FBI director James Comey and the picture, the 86-47 picture that he put up. | ||
| The world news, obviously, Trump... | ||
| In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Qatar. | ||
| Then we will have, sure, Michael, we've got one of your cohorts over there at CNN. | ||
| Jake Tapper's got a new book about something that for some reason I was talking about for five years, but mainstream media didn't. | ||
| Bit on Maha and much more. | ||
| Let's start with this image from James Comey, former FBI director's Instagram over the weekend. | ||
| Apparently he was just wandering down the beach and saw this made out of shells 86-47. | ||
| Now, most of you, anyone that has worked in a restaurant, knows what 86 means when they don't have the meat anymore, the fish or anything, you 86 it. | ||
| It's gone, 86. 86 also was a mafia term over the years because they used to go up to the, not to the World Trade Center, to the Empire State Building, and they would toss people off the 86th floor, and it does not end well for you when you land after the 86th floor. | ||
| So he posts that, and of course, 47 references Donald Trump. | ||
| He started getting some pushback, and here's what he posted. | ||
| I posted earlier a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk when I assumed, which I assumed were a political message. | ||
| I didn't realize some folks associated those numbers with violence. | ||
| It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down. | ||
| Sure, Michael, let me start with you here. | ||
| I know you're not a mind reader, but what do you think he was thinking when he—let's go on the assumption that he actually saw that. | ||
| I'll take his word for it that he saw it, that he didn't do the shell creation. | ||
| I'm willing to go that far. | ||
| What do you think he was thinking when he posted that on Instagram? | ||
| Do you think he had no idea? | ||
| And if he had no idea, how do you know it was a political message? | ||
| You know, look, if he just stumbled upon that, then yesterday I stumbled upon a pot of gold and a leprechaun. | ||
| Congrats. | ||
| Willing to grant every single wish I've ever wanted. | ||
| I mean, the absurdity of this, to believe that people are that stupid, to think that he just stumbled upon that, is really, frankly, outrageous. | ||
| And this guy's a former director of the FBI. | ||
| You mean to tell me he didn't have any clue? | ||
| What the word 86 means. | ||
| He said he assumed, as you stated, that he wasn't aware that it was a political message. | ||
| I don't believe that to be true. | ||
| I think he thought that he could post that and perhaps no one was saying anything about it. | ||
| And the question for me becomes here, Dave, let's say there was some person out there with some mental illness or some extremist who really disliked the president and saw Comey's post and said, you know what, I'm going to act upon it. | ||
| Is Comey now going to be culpable for the actions of said individual or individuals? | ||
| And so what Tulsi Gabbard said yesterday on the Fox News interview that this guy should absolutely be looked into. | ||
| I believe the Secret Service is going to visit him. | ||
| If not today, in the next couple of days, we have to send a signal in this country considering how antagonistic politics have made various sides that you cannot, we cannot stand for individuals, particularly people who have held leadership positions. | ||
| Making these types of tropes about causing violence against a sitting president, a husband, a father, a grandfather. | ||
| And those of us on the conservative right are just supposed to look the other way. | ||
| Those days are frankly over. | ||
| And so I hope that we send a clear message not only to Mr. Comey, but any other moron out there who believes they can get away with this. | ||
| Those days are done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, Emily, there's two parts to this. | ||
| One is just what we may all believe the message to be, 86-47. | ||
| It seems fairly obvious to anyone that has been paying attention to pretty much anything. | ||
| But then the other part is his response, which is what the media does with everything, which is just pure gaslighting. | ||
| Like that he just saw four numbers and just was like, I'll post a picture of it. | ||
| It's just, that's the thing that now to watch the media run cover, like, you didn't know what he was doing. | ||
| It's just absurd. | ||
| I think we might have lost Emily for a second. | ||
| So sure, Michael, I think you agree with that. | ||
| So why don't we, while we reconnect with Emily, why don't I jump ahead for a second? | ||
| I'm going to show the Tulsi Gabbard appearance on Jesse Waters last night that you just referred to. | ||
|
unidentified
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Like him, who issued direct threats against the President of the United States, essentially issuing a call to assassinate him, must be held accountable under the law. | |
| Do you believe Comey should be in jail? | ||
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unidentified
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I do. | |
| any other person with the position of influence that he has, people who take very seriously what a guy of his stature, his experience, and what the Emily, I think we have you back there. | ||
| So my first question to you before you froze up was just sort of the gaslighting portion of this, to put up a statement saying he didn't even know what he was doing. | ||
| I think there's something to discuss there. | ||
| And then we can get to Tulsi's comments in a second. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, we've been gaslit by the last administration for four years, so I have to say that I am quite used to it. | ||
| But if you were a regular person that stumbled upon these seashells on the beach, similar to what Schermichael said, maybe I'd believe you. | ||
| Personally, I had to chat GPT, what, 87, 86, whatever it was stood for? | ||
| 86, 47, yeah. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| But if you're telling me you're the former FBI head, and you don't know what that stands for, and now you're insulting my intelligence. | ||
| Secondly, he contradicted his own statement by saying, I didn't know that this was an act of violence slash a political statement. | ||
| But when you posted the photo, clearly you drew the correlation enough to post it and write cool message. | ||
| And then you admitted you know it was a political statement. | ||
| So now you're just insulting all of our intelligence at that point. | ||
| But similar to what Tulsi said, I'm a bit conflicted here. | ||
| On one hand, was this a direct call to violence? | ||
| I'd say no. | ||
| Was it disgusting and shows what a garbage human being he is after Trump has been attempted to been killed two times? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| My question /statement is, do people with titles /former administration officials have different free speech rules? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| But if the answer is no, then I don't think anyone should be arrested for something that's not a direct call to action. | ||
| I'm with you on that because there is an important distinction here, which is, and the left does this with everything, they get as close as they can. | ||
| I mean, we see this at all of the campus protests and almost everything that the squad is doing. | ||
| They get as close as they can to calling for direct violence without explicitly saying it. | ||
| So yeah, sure, Michael, what do you think about that nuance right there? | ||
| I certainly understand Emily's predicament, and we certainly don't want to foster an environment where you're just arresting people for saying whatever they want to say. | ||
| I'm a big free speech guy. | ||
| However, it's sort of clear to me that you don't need to directly say it. | ||
| That's the caveat in all of this. | ||
| It's just to hint towards it, to give an idea of what I think should happen. | ||
| That is a motivating factor enough, I would argue. | ||
| For a person to look at that and say, you know, we probably should get rid of this guy. | ||
| We should 86 this guy. | ||
| This is no different, I would argue. | ||
| We saw what happened in Illinois. | ||
| This is a very different parallel, but I'm just trying to make an overall point here. | ||
| Where the parents of the child who shot up the school were ultimately charged and arrested and sentenced, right? | ||
| They didn't directly go and shoot up the school. | ||
| But the argument from the prosecution was, well, they were aware. | ||
| They knew that their kid had a mental instability. | ||
| The same applies here in terms of the framing of the logic. | ||
| Comey was aware that he doesn't need to directly say go out and cause harm against the president. | ||
| I need to merely insinuate what my desire is to therefore lead to action. | ||
| The outcome to me is all the same. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Just to play the devil's advocate for a second, I do think a certain amount of people might hear you say that and go, well, wait a minute, that sounds an awful like Donald Trump on January 6th. | ||
| Go to the Capitol and have your voices heard, and then they can extrapolate anything from that. | ||
| So it's a really tricky one. | ||
| But Tulsi... | ||
| Saying he should be behind bars is quite a statement. | ||
| And this from Kristi Noem. | ||
| Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of the President of the United States. | ||
| DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately. | ||
| So regardless of how we're whittling what he said down, I mean, you have two... | ||
| Big-time administration officials that are not having it. | ||
| I mean, well, let's put it this way. | ||
| Do you guys think it would be good if we jail the guy at this point for that statement? | ||
| I mean, are we better off as a country for having jailed him, even though we're obviously not defending him here? | ||
| Well, I wouldn't say jail the guy, but I would certainly say he should be investigated. | ||
| The Secret Service, again, they've taken a first direct, immediate step of visiting him to try to get an understanding. | ||
| Of the intent, although I think the intent personally is clear. | ||
| And then we gotta look at the case law, and is there enough to potentially charge him? | ||
| And if there is, then we move forward. | ||
| If there isn't, then we don't. | ||
| We're conservative people. | ||
| We're not like individuals on the philosophical left where we just want to jail people who disagree with us. | ||
| That's not our worldview. | ||
| But we do follow the case law, and wherever the case law leads us, Dave, then that's where we ultimately go. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm pretty sure, you know, it's tiring to do the, oh, the other side would have done it the other way, but I'm pretty sure if there had been an 86-46 implying Joe Biden, that the same people defending it would be going crazy right now. | ||
| I think Emily's frozen again, so we're just going to look at it. | ||
| You're a CNN contributor getting primetime Rubin Report minutes right now. | ||
| You can thank Emily's internet connection for that. | ||
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| All right, Emily is back. | ||
| She has two strikes, and you know our policy here, three strikes and you're out, so we'll see what happens. | ||
| Let's jump over to the Middle East, obviously. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm back. | |
| I don't think so. | ||
| Well, you're there, a little pixelated, but you're hanging in. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| But let's jump over to Trump in the Middle East, because it's just been a rather extraordinary week. | ||
| Whether you like what he's doing or you don't like what he's doing, to see something so profoundly different in American policy is rather remarkable. | ||
| That seems to be his secret skill, which is just moving the ball in ways no one else could before. | ||
| Here's a little compilation of what happened in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. | ||
| There is no gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by... | ||
| The people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives. | ||
| Yet I'm here today not merely to condemn the past chaos of Iran's leaders, but to offer them a new path and a much better path toward a far better and more hopeful future. | ||
| I want to make a deal with Iran. | ||
| If I can make a deal with Iran, I'll be very happy if we're going to make your region and the world a safer place. | ||
| But if Iran's leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive maximum pressure. | ||
| I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Emily, there's so much to say about the speeches, but just from those clips right there, what I loved was he basically was saying, We've made some mistakes. | ||
| We're going to do it differently. | ||
| And if you want to be part of an America that's going to lead the world, not make you bow to us, but if you want to do business with us, if you want to treat people fairly, if you want to stop shooting rockets all over the place and all of the stuff, then we're here for you. | ||
| To me, it could not have been more pitch perfect. | ||
| I know you've been to that area of the world a lot lately for sports purposes. | ||
| What was your take? | ||
|
unidentified
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I personally had never... | |
| I've heard a better, more perfect speech in my entire life than that speech right there. | ||
| There was one thing that really changed my perspective, and it wasn't in one of the clips that you showed, but it was after discussing Iran, where Trump said, "I don't believe in permanent enemies." And when he said that, I had to think to myself, what an interesting perspective to offer. | ||
| But that's the way it needs to be done. | ||
| There's been so much outrage about Trump's trip, particularly in the Middle East. | ||
| He's saying that he's warming up to our enemies. | ||
| Oh, he's letting our enemies make fools out of us. | ||
| But the truth is a good leader will make sure that his country is in a safe and normalized state. | ||
| The only way to do that is sometimes meeting your enemies in the middle and making sure that you can find some common ground, whether it's business deals, which seems to be the case in the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar. | ||
| Now Iran is a different animal that Trump is going to have to fight. | ||
| It's nice that he's extending that olive branch because the truth is, I didn't think he would. | ||
| I didn't know if they were deserving of that olive branch, but clearly Trump took the higher road here. | ||
| Yeah, sure, Michael. | ||
| What's your take on this? | ||
| Because the other part that I thought was interesting is how he clearly made it like, okay, you guys can jump with us, but we still have an Iran issue and they've lost some of their proxies because we bombed the hell out of the Houthis in Yemen. | ||
| Israel basically took out Hezbollah. | ||
| There's obviously still a Hamas problem, but largely the big issues... | ||
| Slightly putting Syria aside, the big issues are kind of being dealt with right now, which just leaves Iran and everybody else can get on the crazy train with us. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, Iran is certainly important for us for the preservation of maritime law. | ||
| You need to have the free transport of goods via ships without our ships or the ships of our allies being attacked by Houthi rebels. | ||
| And so the president stating a maximum pressure if you don't come to the negotiating table, I think, was well received by the individuals there and hopefully the broader region. | ||
| But I'm looking at this, Dave, in two particular ways. | ||
| And I was just making some notes. | ||
| As we watched that brief clip of the president. | ||
| And at the top of the clip, the president talked about how it wasn't nation-building that has led to the wealth that has been created and ultimately sustained in that part of the world. | ||
| And that, as a conservative, is a recognition of the cultural inheritance, the customs of behavior, the norms that they have preserved in their region that's led to the economic success and the academic success, I would argue. | ||
| That we're now seeing and hopefully will be trading partners and allies with moving forward. | ||
| That, to me, is something that you don't see often from the president. | ||
| There's sort of a very nuanced sort of academic hint towards a preservation of conservative values, and that's something that is very, very important to me. | ||
| And then the president sort of talked about disentangling from old foreign policy of old. | ||
| He talked about this. | ||
| This is a new direction for the United States of America. | ||
| And some people have been critical of the president. | ||
| I push back on that by saying partnering with Saudi Arabia is important. | ||
| They are arguably the most powerful, wealthiest country in the region. | ||
| And if we can improve upon our relationship there, I think it helps us with Syria, it helps us with Iran, and obviously that's going to be very fundamentally critical and important for us with our ally Israel, and also how we move the needle somewhat, if we can, with their constant barrage of terrorist attacks that they're often trying to push back and defend themselves against. | ||
| And so to me, I think this is a step in the right direction. | ||
| Hopefully this disentangling of foreign policy of old that have led to incredibly costly foreign wars where we've lost a lot of our own lives. | ||
| Our allies have lost a lot of lives there. | ||
| Hopefully this is a direction that will move not only our interests forward, but hopefully be a new day for the Middle East. | ||
| And so I give the president an A-plus on this. | ||
| I think this is a very big deal. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I feel like we need to... | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| Well, just briefly, I mean, not only do I agree, but it's like, okay, so if what you can do now is bring Saudi Arabia and then potentially a more stabilized Syria into the Abraham Accords, then you actually have a peace pact in the Middle East. | ||
| Again, you still have to deal with Iran, but then all of the other countries are no longer warring. | ||
| It cools the temperature, and then you could really see a bright future. | ||
| Go ahead, Emily. | ||
| I feel like, first of all, nothing brings pals to the table like a common enemy. | ||
| And it's clear here that Iran is not only an enemy to the United States, but it's actually a threat to the greater Middle East as a whole. | ||
| And for everyone to come together and recognize that, and either get Iran to surrender their old ways of terrorism and come to the negotiating table, or to mutually understand that we all have to take on Iran, is going to actually—it's much better to— Bond that way over anything else. | ||
| Second to money, of course. | ||
| But I feel like we need to give credit where it's due. | ||
| So now, personally, when I went to Saudi Arabia, I was warned by multiple people from multiple countries not to go. | ||
| And the reality was, when I was there, despite my political takes, despite my proud Judaism, my Zionism, I was not met with anything other than respect. | ||
| Hospitality and kindness. | ||
| And I feel like for them to be one of the first countries after the UAE to take on this new initiative of coexistence and peace, don't think it's not threatening for them. | ||
| Don't think they're not getting the pushback, too. | ||
| Don't think their lives are not in danger for becoming the big bad West that the Middle East has pained America to become. | ||
| So I feel like we also need to give credit where it's due, not just to the president, but to the other leaders for being brave enough to go against what many Arabs want and to find peace. | ||
| Emily, try to take some of those views to Colombia or Yale sometime. | ||
| Let us know how it goes. | ||
| Probably not as well as in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Let me show you an image here. | ||
| This is Trump with Qatar's Sheikh Tamin bin Hamad, which, you know, Qatar is a—we've mostly talked about Saudi Arabia here. | ||
| Qatar is a little more complex because they were definitely funding and housing some of the Hamas guys, and Trump seems to want to kill them with kindness right now. | ||
| And then check this out from White House spokesperson Caroline Levitt. | ||
| President Trump at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, they shut down— And then, look at this. | ||
| This is from Hassan Sajwani, who's an ex-commentator, and I just thought this was interesting. | ||
| The world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, just lit up in the American flag on the occasion of President Trump's visit tonight to the UAE. | ||
| And actually, we'll go a little bit further. | ||
| Here's Kobisi Letter, another ex-global commentary account. | ||
| This is wild. | ||
| President Trump's four day trip to the Middle East just raised 2.5 trillion in capital to the US, the UAE 1.4 trillion, Saudi Arabia 600 billion, Qatar 500 billion. | ||
| The combined value of these investments is larger than the market cap of all but three public companies in the world. | ||
| This marks the largest foreign investment commitment ever raised by a president in US So, sure, Michael, putting some of the political parts aside. | ||
| Do you think that maybe this is actually how we get peace? | ||
| Once countries start doing business with each other, they will become less inclined to bomb each other or stop shipping routes, as you referenced, etc. | ||
| Because they're like, oh, we may have different cultural views, religious views, etc. | ||
| But we now have a common cause, which is success. | ||
| And that is the thing that Trump is good at. | ||
| Look, again, Dave, not to reiterate and repeat myself, I don't want to sound repetitive here, but this is... | ||
| Really significant for a number of reasons. | ||
| And I would imagine not knowing the thought process of the president or his inner circle of advisers, but I would imagine the thought process is similar to what Milton Friedman argued back in the, I guess, middle to late 70s. | ||
| If you introduce the idea of free trade, if you introduce the idea of unleashed capitalism, a society really sees what that opportunity looks like, not just for those who are at the very top, but those in the middle, and more importantly, those at the bottom who oftentimes are the foundation of that level of consumerism that allows a society to grow and expand, economically speaking. | ||
| And so my assumption here is that the president, being a former business guy, he always talks about how much he loves to get into deals. | ||
| My assumption here is a part of the thought process is if we can introduce them into a new world of exchange, economically speaking, and they see what this exchange will do, again, not just for the top, but for the middle, and most importantly, for the bottom, then there will be more of an incentive. | ||
| To not want to attack each other. | ||
| There will be more of an incentive not to want to back individuals that are attacking Israel, and ultimately there will be more of an incentive to build and expand a partnership with the United States, which I think ultimately is the fundamental objective and goal here coming from the Trump administration. | ||
| And lastly, I'll say here, we've got to trust but verify. | ||
| You mentioned Qatar and how they have certainly been backers of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. | ||
| That should never be lost upon us. | ||
| But they have an opportunity here, unlike one they have ever had in the past, Dave, with previous administrations. | ||
| My hope is that they will take it, unleash capitalism, unleash that free exchange of commerce to build up your society even further and build upon a potential great relationship with the United States and maybe even other countries in the West. | ||
| Right, like selling freedom is better than dropping bombs for sure. | ||
| I think we might have lost Emily again. | ||
| All right, that's it. | ||
| Three strikes, she's out. | ||
| It's just me and you, man. | ||
| Let's see what we can do here. | ||
| Let me throw to one of the other guys. | ||
| So there's three guys at CNN that I can throw to, and I know I don't have to make fun of them. | ||
| It's sure Michael Singleton, it's Scott Jennings, and Kevin O 'Leary. | ||
| Take a look, because he had an interesting take that's a little bit sort of off the angle that we've been going on here. | ||
| Take a look. | ||
| What's going on with this trip are two things. | ||
| One is China. | ||
| He doesn't want China to develop a relationship in what I call the Middle East circle of friendship. | ||
| And that is Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. | ||
| And then you ask yourself, why are all these AI guys with him? | ||
| What's with that? | ||
| And I'll tell you what it's about. | ||
| At the end of this week, he has a meeting in Abu Dhabi. | ||
| And what's happened in the last two years? | ||
| Maybe it's taken three. | ||
| But U.S. is number one in AI development and spending. | ||
| Number two is China. | ||
| Number three now, and very advanced in certain verticals, is the United Arab Emirates. | ||
| They are so far ahead in many different verticals. | ||
| And he wants to see that cooperation on AI be removed from the China model. | ||
| Because remember there was talk about the UAE starting to talk to China about AI. | ||
| He doesn't want any of that. | ||
| He wants these companies to form very strong minds in AI. | ||
| And when we get later this week to the UAE, that's what you're going to hear about. | ||
| This is crucial. | ||
| So China and AI and, of course, all this money talk's fantastic. | ||
| But we're in an economic war with China, and he is cutting them off at the pass in the fastest-growing region on Earth, the Middle East. | ||
| All right, sure, Michael. | ||
| It's just me and you now. | ||
| I really like that angle because it's not sort of just the pure, OK, America made mistakes in the Middle East. | ||
| Let's think about it differently. | ||
| He's looking at it in a much broader sense, which is that the AI revolution is here whether we like it or not. | ||
| Skynet is here. | ||
| The robots are here. | ||
| All the sci-fi stuff that I love is here right now. | ||
| And maybe actually what we're doing has a little something to do with that, not just, oh, maybe there's more access to markets or a little more oil or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think Kevin O 'Leary, who is a dear friend, we text here and there. | ||
| How do they let him on CNN and Fox? | ||
| He's the only guy that's allowed to do that crossover. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| So when you're not under contract, Dave, you can kind of go all over the place. | ||
| And he and I actually talked about that. | ||
| He said, you know, you're so good. | ||
| You should not sign again so that you can appear all over the place. | ||
| I said, we'll see how that works out, Kevin. | ||
| But look, Dave, he's right. | ||
| The Chinese have an interesting strategy here, globally speaking. | ||
| They're all over Africa. | ||
| They're in the Congo, you know, getting those rare earth minerals that they actually refine. | ||
| Believe it or not, I don't know if your audience is aware of this, 70% of our imports of rare earth minerals come from China. | ||
| And these minerals are important for our defense, our energy needs, and even our industrial development needs as well. | ||
| Even these little smartphones, these things we love so much, you need the refinement of those rare earth minerals for battery technologies. | ||
| Elon Musk and smart cars, you need rare earth minerals for those as well. | ||
| So that's one side of the argument of trying to cripple China there, I think, is fundamentally important. | ||
| But two, AI is the next frontier. | ||
| We were once an agrarian society, then we transformed into an industrial society. | ||
| Now we're in the beginning stages of the nano phase. | ||
| And I would argue whoever leads this phase, more so than being an agrarian society, more so than being an industrialized society, whoever leads this phase, I would say will probably lead for the next maybe 500 to 1,000 years. | ||
| Based on what some of our current analysts are predicting, where this will ultimately go and the transformations that it will lead for defense needs, for health needs. | ||
| And I can go down the line. | ||
| And so I think the president wanting to build upon the relationship with the Middle East, as they are the number three in leading with AI technology, is smart. | ||
| China is also there. | ||
| I've been studying this for quite some time, even with BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, a currency pact that they've been really trying to improve upon to usurp the dollar's lead, internationally speaking. | ||
| They have constantly been going to Dubai, to Qatar, other countries in the region to try to build upon their relationship there. | ||
| And so I think Trump is really looking at sort of a chess move here versus checkers. | ||
| How do we decouple from them in terms of the reliance on rare earth minerals? | ||
| How do we make sure that we strengthen upon the relationship with the Middle East for for A.I. versus China? | ||
| And also, I think this is important, Dave, when you don't hear about this... | ||
| As much as I think we probably should, the Chinese essentially import-export bank has been going around the globe giving out these essential zero-interest-rate loans to developing nations. | ||
| And the reason they're doing this is to build relationships and loyalty with these countries to shift that loyalty from the United States to China. | ||
| And so a recognition of how we need to usurp what they're attempting to do in three critical areas here I think is absolutely foundational. | ||
| And people may ignore this now. | ||
| But I promise you in 10 years, we'll look back on this moment and say, holy smoke, this was absolutely consequential to maintaining the U.S. global lead across the world. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the money lending part of this, because that's what I've said for years. | ||
| I've been saying the same thing, like a very simplistic version, is if this was the mafia, when the mafia lends you money, even if you get it on the cheap, if you don't pay it back when they want you to pay it back, you will be in trouble. | ||
| So unless we want to end up in some kind of real war with China, then we better start thinking about things a little bit differently. | ||
| Let's talk about 1775 Coffee for a second, and then we will jump over to some stuff that's happening over at CNN. | ||
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| It's all single origin, small batch, and toxin-free. | ||
| If you've watched 1775 Coffee, Okay, sure, Michael, this might get a little awkward here, because we've got to talk about one of your colleagues. | ||
| But the big story in media this week was about Jake Tapper's new book, which is about the cover-up around Joe Biden's mental... | ||
| So first, let's just throw to Jake in his own words explaining the book. | ||
| Jake Tapper here, Alex Thompson from Axios, and I wrote a book. | ||
| It's coming out next Tuesday. | ||
| It's called Original Sin, President Biden's Decline. | ||
| It's cover-up. | ||
| And his disastrous choice to run again. | ||
| The book is drawn from more than 200 interviews with mostly Democratic insiders, almost all of them after the election. | ||
| And one of the things we were shocked to learn, the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O 'Connor, talked about how if Biden had one more fall, he might actually need to be in a wheelchair. | ||
| But this was all put off until after the election. | ||
| They did not want images of Biden in a wheelchair. | ||
| So, Shermarco, look, I know you work with the guy. | ||
| I know it's your network, so I won't lead you too much here. | ||
| I've been very critical of him. | ||
| I was talking about Biden's mental acuity. | ||
| We found videos literally back in 2019 of me talking about it. | ||
| But right there, as he's doing the promo, he says, we were shocked to find out the doctor said he might be in a wheelchair. | ||
| Hearing that, when I heard it yesterday, I was like, why would that be shocking to you? | ||
| If you've just seen the way he's been walking Biden for the last couple of years, you know what that's like. | ||
| You know what happens to 80-year-olds when they fall and the hip and everything else. | ||
| So I think the main thing that people are upset by... | ||
| It's not that a book is being written about this, because clearly some stuff was going to come out. | ||
| But it seems to be that Jake and CNN and some of the other mainstream media outlets, they were largely telling us not to see what we were all seeing with our own eyes. | ||
| And now that a book's coming out about it, it's just throwing it back at our faces. | ||
| I think that's a pretty fair estimation of how most people are feeling. | ||
| Look, I first of all politically think, Dave, that this is a great benefit to the Republican Party. | ||
| Yeah, right there, just bringing it back. | ||
| Yeah, the book that Biden is working on, which he announced on his interview with The View with his wife, I think a week ago, comes out sometime next year, maybe even a month or two months before midterms. | ||
| So again, as someone who's worked on a lot of campaigns, I love this because it gives Republicans the opportunity to put this question back at the forefront of not only Democrats, but the point that you just made the mainstream media, which has seen a complete nosedive of their ratings and trust, and it just forces Democrats to answer on the record. | ||
| Did you really know, or did you believe, or did you try to hide what you knew about the president's health? | ||
| I mean, I remember, Dave, not even last year, two years ago, I remember being on CNN, when the news reports really started to increase a bit more about Biden's mental and physical state. | ||
| And I even had people DMing me, people that I had once upon a time respected, saying, you know, I'm appalled that you're questioning the president's mental acuity. | ||
| You know, you're better than this. | ||
| We have no evidence of this. | ||
| And I got to tell you, I'm kind of happy that these books are coming out now because I've been saying this stuff for a couple of, maybe two, three years now, that something just wasn't quite right. | ||
| You could just look at him and tell. | ||
| I remember having a conversation with my own grandmother about my great-grandmother, maybe when she was around 95, so towards the tail end of her life. | ||
| My grandmother saying, you know, look, I've seen this before, so when you're on TV, you need to be honest about this. | ||
| There's something not quite right there. | ||
| And so I'm kind of happy that myself, people like you and others... | ||
| Finally, I can say we were right all along. | ||
| We were right to point out that the president probably should not have been leading the country. | ||
| We were right to raise the question if the president was having these on and off days, or who was leading? | ||
| We know it wasn't Kamala Harris because they completely boxed her out. | ||
| Was it Jill Biden? | ||
| Was it other individuals in his inner circle who we actually did not elect? | ||
| These were appointed individuals who were running some of the most consequential and making some of those consequential decisions about our national security and other policy decisions that we didn't vote for these people to make. | ||
| And so this is a massive cover up, unlike one we have ever seen. | ||
| I think this usurps what we saw with Watergate. | ||
| And my hope is that Republicans in Congress. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Yeah, you know, my audience knows I'm sort of tired of saying that I feel bad for the guy thing. | ||
| But yes, we've all been confronted with this. | ||
| You just mentioned your great-grandmother. | ||
| Both of my grandmothers at the end of their lives had this, one of whom I really was helping and spending a lot of time with at the geriatric doctors and all that. | ||
| And that's the weird part here at the human level. | ||
| Forget politics for a sec. | ||
| You know, they put Biden out last week on The View, and he clearly was getting lost again, and Jill knew when to help him, and Joy knew when to help him and all that. | ||
| And it's like, man, you guys could have just put him up there and done something. | ||
| So incredible for the country. | ||
| You could have put him up there and said, you know, there actually is something going on here. | ||
| And, you know, many people are going to be confronted with this and we're going to address it now while he's still, you know. | ||
| Here, let's say. | ||
| And they refuse to do that. | ||
| It would have healed a little bit of what you're talking about, and it would have been good, I think, spiritually for the country, but they can't do it. | ||
| And then it leads to headlines like this. | ||
| This is from CNN. | ||
| Biden didn't recognize George Clooney at 2024 fundraiser, new book says. | ||
| Now, everyone remembers that. | ||
| That was in June of 24, right before the disastrous debate. | ||
| And at that event that Clooney was at and Barack Obama was at, and everyone remembers, you know, Obama putting his arm around him and ushering Biden offstage. | ||
| It was so depressing. | ||
| The media went crazy running cover for that. | ||
| Here's Brian Stelter on the cheap fake notion. | ||
| You know, the White House press secretary used the phrase "cheapfakes," the idea of "cheapfakes." Let me explain what that is to people. | ||
| We've been worried for years about AI deepfakes, that computer-generated images are going to trick people into believing something that's totally false. | ||
| Cheapfakes are a little bit simpler. | ||
| They're cheap. | ||
| They're just distorted, out-of-context videos, chopped up in certain ways, constructed in certain ways. | ||
| That's what we're seeing. | ||
| That's what the Biden administration and the Biden campaign is so worried about right now. | ||
| But make no mistake, they are worried about this. | ||
| This is a real problem. | ||
| This is not some made-up fiction. | ||
| The videos are oftentimes made up. | ||
| Sure, Michael, before we go into the stelter part of this, the video they're showing you on the side, and that's the beauty of the Internet. | ||
| You can listen to nonsense while watching reality. | ||
| I really think Obama was signaling to that night. | ||
| Signaling that night to everybody, let's get this guy out of the way. | ||
| I think the way he put his hand on his back and ushered him off, he knew people were going to see that video. | ||
| And it was his way of kind of being like, enough of this guy, let's move on to Kamala. | ||
| Does that seem like a conspiracy theory or crazy to you? | ||
| I mean, I think he was certainly signaling something. | ||
| I mean, look at the George Clooney article in and of itself. | ||
| We know now that it was Obama who really pushed him to write that column as a hope that it would spur concerns within the party from the highest levels of the donor class to the leadership class to the activist class. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| And I just want to say, before I get to the stelter thing, I have seen a number of interviews, including from Joe Biden, last week on The View. | ||
| Where he said Kamala Harris didn't win because she's a mixed-race woman and because of her gender. | ||
| And I'd have to tell you something, Dave. | ||
| I absolutely reject that. | ||
| And let me be clear. | ||
| I'm not saying that there aren't people who may not want to vote for a woman. | ||
| Yeah, we all know there are probably some people like that. | ||
| I'm not saying that there aren't people who say, you know, I'm not comfortable voting for someone of color. | ||
| Maybe those people probably exist, too. | ||
| But I would argue that they're probably minuscule in terms of their percentage of the overall American voting population. | ||
| With that said... | ||
| Kamala Harris performed far better than Hillary Clinton did. | ||
| She performed better than President Trump did in his first term. | ||
| She performed exceptionally well when you compare that to the 2020 race. | ||
| And so my thing is, the woman didn't perform well enough to win. | ||
| President Trump got a lot of votes from a lot of people of a lot of different ethnicities. | ||
| That we should all be proud of, particularly those of us on the right. | ||
| The guy performed so well with Latino men and women, with black men, particularly in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Texas. | ||
| Some of those numbers are double digits. | ||
| We should not ignore that, those of us on the political right. | ||
| But for Democrats to not be proud of how they performed because the knee-jerk reaction is to go to race and gender. | ||
| It's really unfortunate to me, and it undercuts the fact that she did perform well when compared to a white woman, Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So when you look at those things, numerically speaking, just take away the emotionalism here and just look at the raw data. | ||
| Why, if you're a Democrat, would you say, you know, look, we didn't do well. | ||
| Donald Trump is a juggernaut. | ||
| He's a political phenomenon. | ||
| He hit that ball way out of the park. | ||
| And we applaud the president for doing so. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| On our side, we applaud ourselves for doing better than what any Democrat has done in the past. | ||
| Why not be proud of that, Dave? | ||
| Why always have to go to race or go to gender? | ||
| That, to me, is an excuse, if you will, for why she didn't perform well versus saying... | ||
| We did perform well, just not well enough. | ||
| And we're going to salute the winner because to the victor goes the spoils. | ||
| That's the way they should look at that. | ||
| And I think those of us in this country, whether you're black, white, male or female, should reject this onus of an argument that we constantly hear coming from Democrats, again, including the former president a week ago on The View. | ||
| Now to Brian Stelter. | ||
| Well, wait, pause on Stelter for a sec, because you hit something there that I really think is interesting, because, you know, I made the point about how, OK, they could have had a healing moment around his cognitive stuff, and they didn't do that on The View, obviously. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| Then they let him say that it was sexism. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| It was sexism and that she was a woman. | ||
| And it's like, had Biden been like, you know what? | ||
| I did drop out a little late, and maybe she wasn't the best candidate ever. | ||
| Then, again, you can start reversing some of the nonsense. | ||
| It would signal to the party, oh, there's some layer of truth here, but they simply can't do it. | ||
| And now, to Stelter, before we show you some video of Jake himself, what do you make of the people that were running cover for five years on the mainstream media while the rest of us were talking about this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I've said this. | ||
| I think you may have covered this on your show, Dave. | ||
| I know I have a couple clips of a couple of YouTube guys and podcasters who've covered my clips of saying the media is culpable in this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I fundamentally believe this, and I think it's arguably why we have seen writ large a severe decrease in reliance of the viewing public's perspective on the media. | ||
| The viewing public doesn't really trust the media the way they once did. | ||
| I don't think it's... | ||
| I don't think it's inappropriate to ask, has the media been fair in its coverage? | ||
| Not just of this particular issue, but on a slew of issues. | ||
| I don't think it's fair to raise the question for the mainstream media, how many of them actually lean to the left versus those who lean to the right? | ||
| I'd be willing to bet that a good portion of them probably did vote for Kamala Harris, probably traditionally vote for Democrats for the most part compared to conservatives. | ||
| And so if you're a viewer from the viewer's perspective, you're in the public and you're trying to wonder, well, am I getting an objective broadcast here? | ||
| You're probably right to say you're more than likely not, because ideologically, most of these people are leaning to one political side versus having maybe some folks to the left and maybe some people to the right so that you're getting two different perspectives versus having myself and Scott Jennings and maybe like a David Urban being sort of your token conservatives, giving a conservative argument while everybody else is giving an argument of the left. | ||
| It really diminishes the trust that the media once upon a time had. | ||
| And I would probably be remiss in not saying that I don't think that trust is going to be returned. | ||
| I think That's why individuals like yourself, you're doing exceptionally well as a source of information. | ||
| I just started a whole network, We the Free, where people can come and firearms and news, where they can get information, where they don't have to go through those traditional means. | ||
| And so I'm happy now that people can put their dollars and their support behind individuals who they trust. | ||
| I think this reckoning was ultimately going to happen at some point, but I think there's a great benefit. | ||
| to the American people now that it has happened. | ||
| Because now you no longer have, Dave, three or four entities controlling all of the information. | ||
| Now there are a litany of people who are giving out that information and allowing the viewing public to go and do their own research and formulate whatever opinion they want on their own versus being spoons fed information that you don't know if it's true or if they're dosing it with something that may have a little bit of truth but also maybe a little misinformation in it. | ||
| Yeah, well, I appreciate the kind words, but I doubly appreciate the fact that, look, you are to some extent in the machine. | ||
| You're in and out of the machine, right? | ||
| Because you're also doing the online thing, so it's not the easiest thing to talk about. | ||
| So I appreciate the candor there. | ||
| So with that in mind, let me show you. | ||
| Here's just an edit of Jake Tapper. | ||
| I will offer this with no commentary. | ||
| How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very clearly a cognitive decline. | |
| That's what I'm referring to. | ||
| It makes me uncomfortable to watch the money on stage. | ||
| It's so amazing. | ||
| It's so amazing to me that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
And try and figure out an answer. | |
| A cognitive decline. | ||
| Biden embraces his stutter, talking about it, while Trump mocks it, exaggerates it, belittles it. | ||
| He's sharp physically. | ||
| I mean, mentally. | ||
| I think the question is physically, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| More so? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I, who's his chief opponent, is only three or four years younger than him. | ||
| False claims to The Wall Street Journal about President Biden's mental fitness and acuity. | ||
| He's 81, and his memory, you know, it doesn't seem great, it's not horrible, but I don't understand the outrage. | ||
| Quote, behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping. | ||
| Unquote. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which is run by the Murdochs. | ||
| Beyond the headline, there is some critical nuance here. | ||
| The article is mostly based on observations of Republicans, with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy the only one going on the record. | ||
| The Russians are trying to make us and the public not trust our election integrity. | ||
| Joe Biden has dimension, all this stuff. | ||
| All right, sure, Michael. | ||
| So now I'll ask the pointed question, which is, does it seem like that's the guy that's supposed to be writing the book about the cover-up around? | ||
| Joe Biden's mental acuity. | ||
| I have seen a lot of individuals online asking that question, and I'm not going to sit here and try to gaslight your audience. | ||
| Look, I know Jake Tapper. | ||
| I'm friends with Jake. | ||
| I think the world of him. | ||
| I probably wouldn't have even renewed for a second year at CNN if it weren't for two people advocating for me, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, in part because, as I mentioned, I just started my own network and CNN sort of viewed... | ||
| I think it's important for me to say that. | ||
| With that said, Dave... | ||
| I would preference, and maybe some people are going to disagree with me on what I'm about to say, and I completely respect if they are going to push back. | ||
| I would preference someone coming to the realization there is a story here, and we reported this one particular way, and we probably got some things wrong. | ||
| And so as a reporter, I'm going to do my due diligence. | ||
| I am going to write a book. | ||
| I am going to talk to sources who I was talking to who were telling me something different then and make sure, by the way, that they go on the record so that I can write their names in this book. | ||
| To say, well, you said this then, but now you're saying this. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why are you guys trying to hide this? | ||
| Why did you think this was beneficial not only to the president, not only to the Democratic Party, but to the country writ large? | ||
| I'm going to put it in a book so that there is a documented record, and then I'm going to let the viewing public and the American people make their own opinions about me, about my investigation, and about the book writ large. | ||
| And I would far preference more journalists, if I'm being honest with you, Dave, to go that route. | ||
| Then to see what we're seeing from some, including a lot of people at MSNBC who are still saying, oh, well, this is just Republicans trying to make a big noise about this. | ||
| Or to do what we saw from the folks on The View after Biden had left. | ||
| Oh, he was great. | ||
| He was sharp. | ||
| He did wonderfully well. | ||
| All of the great accomplishments he had. | ||
| I can't believe that we're looking into this. | ||
| I would rather someone say, you know what, we probably didn't do the best job here. | ||
| I'm going to do my due diligence. | ||
| I'm going to make up for it by putting it in a book and let the public make whatever decisions you want about me and my reporting versus what we're seeing from a whole lot of other folks in the media, which is to still say the guy is sharp and he was the greatest president in American history. | ||
| There are journalists still saying this. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| I can kind of spiritually get where you're going with that, that okay, kind of better late than never. | ||
| But to me, it has to at least then come with a couple apologies, like a direct apology to a Lara Trump, or Stelter should directly apologize to all of the people he claimed were putting up cheap fakes of the videos that were literally the real videos or something. | ||
| But why don't we leave that there for a moment and talk about the other guy on CNN who I'm constantly playing clips of without mocking him. | ||
| That's Scott. | ||
| Scott Jennings, he wrote this on Twitter. | ||
| Between what we saw of Biden today on The View and my understanding of what's about to drop in the Tapper Thompson book, I don't think Dems have fully internalized the nuclear bomb that's about to hit their party. | ||
| Sure, Michael, that's kind of what you hit before. | ||
| As someone that's not a Democrat, there's a certain fun element to this because it's like, okay, you guys can drop this book now, look ridiculous. | ||
| Biden will drop his book before the midterms. | ||
| It'll bring it all back. | ||
| They'll put him back on TV. | ||
| It'll make it all more obvious. | ||
| So I guess as not Democrats, it's kind of like, keep going, guys. | ||
| Let's push a little bit. | ||
| Please keep going. | ||
| You know what the irony about all of this, Dave? | ||
| I don't know if you've covered this. | ||
| I usually try to watch your show every day, so I don't know if you've covered this or not. | ||
| I've been behind a little bit. | ||
| But Democrats have been coming out against Senator Fetterman out of Pennsylvania about some of what they allege are mental issues and mental instability. | ||
| And I actually tweeted about this because someone part of the leadership on the House side, Republican side, sent it to me and said, hey, we'd love if you post this out. | ||
| And I read the article and I said, isn't this ironic? | ||
| For four years and even to this day, there are still some who are still saying Joe Biden is fine. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| There's nothing wrong here. | ||
| They're still covering up for this guy, and yet they're going after Fetterman. | ||
| I assume this is more so because of his support of Israel than it is about anything else. | ||
| And look, Scott, I just got to say something about Scott Jennings. | ||
| Scott Jennings, to me, is a national hero in mainstream media in terms of being an authentic conservative advocating for conservatism, whether it's economically speaking or our cultural values or even our spiritual values when he does get into his own personal religious faith and beliefs. | ||
| And this guy, to me, as someone who's a lot younger than Scott, I mean, I'm in my early 30s. | ||
| As someone who gets to be on TV with him and I get to look up to this guy and we text all the time. | ||
| And I have my moments, as I was telling you, Dave, where when we're debating certain topics and someone will bring up race. | ||
| And I oftentimes believe they bring it up to me more so than Scott because I'm black. | ||
| I also happen to be a conservative. | ||
| So it's almost like a let me remind you of who you are, if you will. | ||
| And sometimes I'll get really heated during those moments. | ||
| And Scott will text me and he'll say, brother, calm down. | ||
| We all know what they're doing. | ||
| Don't let them get out of character. | ||
| You got this. | ||
| And that's the type of guy Scott Jennings is. | ||
| And so I have a lot of love for that guy. | ||
| I have an immense amount of admiration for just who he is. | ||
| As a person, as a man, he is the best of us. | ||
| And I'm just so glad that I get to be on with him once a week. | ||
| And I'm glad that he's on as often as he is advocating for a mindset that does indeed exist. | ||
| And even Scott and I had this conversation a couple weeks ago about just men in general. | ||
| And he asked me, we were in the car together, getting dropped off after doing an Abby Phillips show. | ||
| And he said, sure, Michael, I'm just curious. | ||
| You know, what are your friends sort of saying about just Trump or about the sort of masculinity issue? | ||
| Because I really want to know what a lot of black guys are thinking about this moment. | ||
| And I said, well, Scott, I said, I think there's some guys who certainly voted for Trump, even in my cohort of friends. | ||
| But there are even some who didn't vote for the president who are slowly starting to move away from the Democratic Party because there's still The conservatives and Republicans seem to speak more about a defense of a traditional form of masculinity. | ||
| That most guys are saying, whether they're white, black, Latino, whatever, rich, poor, college-educated, or non-educated, are saying there are just some fundamental truths that are not subjective to the individual. | ||
| They are just the truth, no matter how you try to slice that pie. | ||
| And a lot of the guys, when we talk about Scott, and I'll screenshot it and send it to him sometimes, and my guys will say, oh man, they got Scott on tonight, and man, he's on fire. | ||
| We love Scott. | ||
| We like Scott. | ||
| Because again, he speaks to something that is missing, that a lot of men in particular, I believe, are yearning for. | ||
| And that is standing true and firm for what you believe, no matter what. | ||
| So I just got to say shout out, shout out to Scott. | ||
| But to that tweet, he's spot on. | ||
| Politically speaking, Democrats find themselves, Dave, in a point where they're asking the American people to trust them again. | ||
| And the American people are saying, well, why should we trust you when on the most consequential office, that being the presidency, who's charged with protecting the country, who's charged with our national security, who's charged with making decisions about our economic and fiscal order with Congress, of course, who's charged with overseeing the protection of our borders with immigration. | ||
| This guy wasn't in charge of any of these things based on all of the books and all the revelatory information we now have today. | ||
| Why should we believe you when you covered this up? | ||
| And so I think Scott was right. | ||
| And I don't think Democrats have come to the reckoning yet. | ||
| They have yet to apologize to the American people. | ||
| They have yet to say we actually didn't tell the truth because we were more concerned about politics. | ||
| We were more concerned with trying to win elections. | ||
| And until they do that... | ||
| I think you're still going to have a crisis among Democrats internally and externally. | ||
| That, again, politically, I think if Republicans are smart, it will behoove us to benefit us next November. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And again, I would say that sort of the same notion about had Biden just said, or Jill had said, you know, there is something wrong and it would have been a little healing. | ||
| I think there was a way Jake could have put this book out there and done a video like the promo video that we just showed you and said, hey, maybe I even missed some of this stuff. | ||
| I just think even one line might have offered a little bit of a forceful. | ||
| But let me just ask you one other thing about these panel things that you're on. | ||
| Usually it's Abby Phillips moderating and it's Scott or you often, or sometimes you're on together. | ||
| I find it hard to believe that a lot of the Clown car of people that you're up against believe what they're saying. | ||
| When I watch Anna Navarro sweating and screaming and yelling and stammering, like, she was once a Marco Rubio conservative. | ||
| I see some of the other people, and yes, they're always pointing out your race and making everything about race and gender. | ||
| And it seems to me that at this point in 2025, most people don't believe that stuff, and it's largely performative. | ||
| I'm not asking you to throw anyone under the bus specifically, but do you think that's fair to say that a lot of what you're saying You know, I think some people actually do believe what they say. | ||
| But this may surprise a lot of people. | ||
| I think fundamentally... | ||
| World views that I have, that you may have, that Scott may have, that your audience may have, that half of the country may maintain, hell, even maybe a third of Democrats, particularly if they're of color, because most people of color are traditionally conservative speaking, and their value proposition. | ||
| I think some of these people really do believe what they're spouting on TV. | ||
| And I do believe that they think that culture is fluid. | ||
| I think they do think that you can put it in a petri dish and shape it however you want, like it's pottery. | ||
| I think they fundamentally believe that. | ||
| I do believe that their critique of America today is radically based upon a disposition that some things you must absolutely destroy and rebuild versus the conservative disposition, which is it is easier to destroy than it is to build. | ||
| I think they fundamentally believe those things. | ||
| And so for me, when I'm on these panels, sometimes I do get frustrated. | ||
| One, because sometimes the racist stuff just always comes up, particularly when it's me. | ||
| But also because I often think to people it's easier to come out against something when you haven't clearly thought about what the alternative thing will be. | ||
| It's easier to say that this is flawed and we should just end it and start something new. | ||
| But what is a new thing? | ||
| Is it not better to maybe build upon this thing that may not be perfect to make it a little better? | ||
| That's why it's so difficult to govern in our country because the founding fathers wanted to avoid complete destruction and absolutism, if you will. | ||
| They wanted a slow but steady build. | ||
| And I think most people are pragmatic in their everyday lives and in their approach, not only to their political decisions, but to the way they raise their families, to their relationships with their colleagues or maybe even their spouse or their friends. | ||
| Most of us are pragmatic in how we want to move forward. | ||
| Now, some of us may be more so on the conservative end of the spectrum like I am. | ||
| Some may be more in the middle. | ||
| Some may be somewhat on the left. | ||
| Maybe they are a little liberal on cultural things, but economically they're a bit conservative. | ||
| or on certain cultural things, they may be a little more conservative. | ||
| I think that is where most of us are. | ||
| Some of the people that I debate, I actually do believe that they do have worldviews that I don't think is healthy to the direction of longevity for our country. | ||
| And I don't say this as a negative thing against who they are as individuals. | ||
| They're entitled. | ||
| I believe in free speech. | ||
| I believe people should be able to articulate what they fundamentally believe. | ||
| I just also believe I'm going to intellectually challenge the merits of your claims because I don't think that those claims are in the best interest of what will continue to maintain the dominance that we currently have on the world stage as being the greatest empire known in the history of mankind. | ||
| It is because of its people. | ||
| It is because we have persevered. | ||
| It is because we are slow to move. | ||
| There's a famous quote that I love, a conservative quote, I prefer the known to the unknown. | ||
| I prefer the imperfect to the perfect. | ||
| These things, I think most people, even if they vote for Democrats, We'll listen to what I just said and say, you know, I do prefer the known to the unknown. | ||
| You know, I don't think perfection is possible. | ||
| I do prefer the imperfect because I do understand that there's certain things that, hell, we're going to have to fix. | ||
| And I even acknowledge there's some things we will never be able to fix. | ||
| I think most people, Dave Rubin, are there. | ||
| They're not where some of the progressivism or some of the sort of radical things we hear from people on the left are. | ||
| And that, to me, gives me great hope about the future of this country, is that most people are starting to realize we've gone too far. | ||
| We have allowed Democrats and liberalism and progressivism to experiment on society, again, as if it's a petri dish, an experiment. | ||
| And we don't like the results of this experiment. | ||
| So we want to go back to a great halcyon days where we were sure of what our outcomes were versus that lack of certainty. | ||
| Man, since you watch the show, you know that quote. | ||
| You know I like to end the show on a positive note, like basically laying out something like you just laid out right there, but yet we still have another segment, so hang tight, Rumble Premium, and then we will finish up on making sure you guys eat okay this weekend. | ||
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| All right, so we're going to finish up with a little healthy eating for the weekend because the Maha movement is here and it's causing change, not government force change necessarily, but it's making corporations look at themselves and go, maybe we don't have to kill everybody while we're feeding them. | ||
| Check this out from ABC News. | ||
| In-N-Out is making ingredient changes to some of its menu items. | ||
| The burger chain is eliminating artificial dyes from its strawberry milkshakes and pink lemonade, replacing them with natural coloring. | ||
| It's also in the process of transitioning to a new ketchup that uses real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| And here's one from RFK Jr. himself. | ||
| In less than 30 days of the HHS and FDA announcing plans to phase out petroleum-based dyes from the nation's food supply, American fast food, sorry, American fast food chain In-N-Outburg, I encourage more companies to prioritize Americans' health and join the effort to make America healthy again. | ||
| Sure, Michael, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I'm not sure you're on board the "let's not kill ourselves with our food" thing, but I really like the idea that this is a private company that's getting a little guidance from the government, that's catching a little bit of what people are talking about culturally, and then making proper choices themselves, as opposed to the government coming in and saying, "You gotta put this in your shake, and you gotta make your ketchup this way, that way, or the other way." Yeah, and I think RFK really sparked a lot of this. | ||
| I'm very close friends with his son and his daughter-in-law. | ||
| Shout out to RFK. | ||
| You know, before I answer that, Dave, I've always found this to be a bit ironic about what RFK has been advocating for in terms of getting rid of a lot of these dyes, which there is some research that suggests that these dyes are cancerous. | ||
| We know for a fact that high fructose corn syrup is actually cancerous. | ||
| There's a lot of research on that from the United States, from Great Britain, and a lot of the Scandinavian countries. | ||
| But a lot of Democrats, a lot of people on the left, have... | ||
| I implored the American people to ignore everything from RFK. | ||
| Maybe you disagree with certain things, and that's okay. | ||
| But on this, I think he's 100% spot on. | ||
| And yet, when it comes to the Scandinavian countries, they say the Americas should follow everything that they're doing, the healthcare, the economy, etc. | ||
| But on this one issue, oh, Republicans and RFK, they are the devil. | ||
| This is why you can't trust people on the left, because the hypocrisy is at an all-time high. | ||
| With that said, I'm happy that RFK is advocating for these things. | ||
| We do want a healthier population. | ||
| We do know that AI is likely going to extend how long people can leave because of that technology, but we want them to be able to live and lead a long, healthy life. | ||
| And in order to do that, you've got to work out and you've got to eat healthy. | ||
| And so I'm happy that In-N-Out Burger, hopefully other food chains will follow suit because a lot of people are going to these places in and out their very busy lives. | ||
| Some people, if you're on the lower end of the economic spectrum, particularly places like McDonald's, Dave, you know this very well. | ||
| A lot of poor Americans rely, unfortunately, on a lot of these places to feed their families. | ||
| To be the result, we want to make sure that the food that they're consuming is healthy food so that those people can be healthy and be around for a very, very long time. | ||
| And so I'm very proud that RFK is advocating for this type of a healthier revival, if you will, for the American people. | ||
| And I'm happy to see that In-N-Out Burger is one of the first companies to follow suit. | ||
| And again, I encourage many other companies to continue to do the same thing. | ||
| It is a benefit for the American people. | ||
| And if you're in the business... | ||
| You want to have those consumers for as long as you possibly can. | ||
| So why not keep them healthy so that they can keep coming back? | ||
| It just makes sense in terms of the bottom line. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's like, right, if you want to just make money, how about not kill everybody and they might come back to your restaurant. | ||
| Now I'll ask you the hardest question of this entire episode, which is what's your favorite burger joint, chain burger joint? | ||
| Because mine is by far, it's the only thing I miss from California. | ||
| It is in and out. | ||
| It is in and out. | ||
| I miss that burger. | ||
| We don't have it here in the free state of Florida. | ||
| What's your favorite chain? | ||
| This has been an ongoing conversation in my studio. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| So I don't eat this often. | ||
| And I know a lot of my friends are going to kick my ass. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| Don't tell me you're not a vegetarian. | ||
| You look way too healthy. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| One of my favorite things to get is a double cheeseburger with a large fry from McDonald's. | ||
| I got to be honest, man. | ||
| My wife has been like, no more of this because you need to be around a long time. | ||
| But Dave, I love to get the double cheeseburger. | ||
| Sometimes I get the triple cheeseburger, which people don't know is even a thing. | ||
| I'll get it. | ||
| I go home. | ||
| I get my large made fresh fries. | ||
| I take the bun off the top. | ||
| I put the fries on there. | ||
| I put a little honey. | ||
| I'm a big honey, guys. | ||
| I put a little honey, which is kind of probably a weird concoction, on top of the fries. | ||
| Put the bun on top, and I just go to work, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, I gotta tell you, my producers here, the whole team, they've been nodding with you a lot, agreeing with a lot of what you're saying here, but you just got major nods in the wrong way on McDonald's. | ||
| But okay, look, hey, this is what America's all about. | ||
| Let's go from Maha, which is about making America healthy again, to this video. | ||
| This is so insane and yet so obvious. | ||
| This is the co-founder of Ben& Jerry's Ice Cream, Ben Cohen, who's basically... | ||
| I would say a LARPing socialist, because he's not really a socialist. | ||
| We'll get to that in a second. | ||
| but he showed up at one of Bobby's hearings in the last couple of days and watch this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't give you a chance! | |
| The witness will suspend. | ||
| The committee will come to order. | ||
| Capitol Police will ask to remove the individuals from the hearing room. | ||
| Members of the audience are reminded disruptions will not be tolerated. | ||
| Our residents can help people with peace. | ||
| Our residents can help people with peace. | ||
| Members of the audience are reminded disruptions will not be permitted while the committee conducts its business. | ||
| Capitol Police are asked to remove the individuals from... | ||
| All right. | ||
| It's kind of funny to me that he looks like Bernie Sanders while he's spouting that stuff. | ||
| And he's showing up to an RFK thing to yell about Gaza. | ||
| The other person screaming that RFK killed people with AIDS. | ||
| It's just complete nonsense. | ||
| But OK, that's usual political theater. | ||
| The best part of Ben Cohen, I'm sure you're aware of this, sure, Michael, is that a man who professes to be a socialist, who made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars selling ice cream to people, well, did you know, ladies and gentlemen, that yes, he sold Ben& Jerry's, Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield, sold Ben& Jerry's, their little ice cream outfit from New Hampshire, to Unilever, a giant corporate conglomerate, back in 2000 for a cool $326 million. | ||
| Sure, Michael, this is a little bit like Bernie railing on the millionaires while flying private to fight the oligarchy, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, flying private. | ||
| He also has a vacation house. | ||
| He's also now a millionaire. | ||
| I mean, these guys know no shame. | ||
| I got a comment on this, though. | ||
| I'm a big gun guy. | ||
| I have two companies in the gun space. | ||
| One is Guns Out TV. | ||
| The other one is We The Free, which I'd invite your audience to check out, wethefree.com or wtf.tv. | ||
| And if you saw the way RFK reacted, and I actually shared this with my business partner who's a Marine, and we both were just talking about how crazy it is that they did not have plainclothes officers mixed in between the audience. | ||
| Because most people may not know this. | ||
| Again, I shoot a lot. | ||
| I used to be a competitive shooter. | ||
| It literally takes seconds if someone were to have a gun, if they were able to figure out a way to get it in there. | ||
| To have fired off a shot that could have been directed towards RFK. | ||
| So from a security perspective, I actually am not very happy about that scene, Dave. | ||
| I'm not saying that they should not allow the public to be a part of these hearing testimonies. | ||
| I think that's important, that that's a cornerstone of our Democratic Republic. | ||
| But you've got to keep these people safe. | ||
| And considering the history of RFK's family, with him being a Kennedy, maybe rope off a couple of roles, or at a minimum, mix. | ||
| Some plainclothes officers in the first two or three rows. | ||
| So if something like that would have happened, those officers could have immediately reacted. | ||
| That couple of seconds of watching those guys have to make their way to the former owner of Ben& Jerry's and the other lady, that to me really, really worried me, man. | ||
| And I'm not happy about that at all. | ||
| They need to make some drastic changes there. | ||
| Now, to answer your question, it's rich. | ||
| This guy is worth... | ||
| You know, more than a quarter of a billion dollars, 300 plus million. | ||
| And he probably has gotten richer if he has some good financial advisors. | ||
| And here he is going after RFK and the rest of the Trump administration talking about how abhorrent all of these individuals are. | ||
| And they always are talking about, oh, the oligarchs and how rich they are. | ||
| Yet these guys have a greater net worth and make more money annually than most of the people who are showing up at their rallies. | ||
| Then most of the people who are probably still out there buying Ben and Jerry's ice cream. | ||
| I'm not saying that you can't be critical of something that you disagree with. | ||
| Absolutely be for that. | ||
| But stop going against people who are successful. | ||
| Stop saying that success and having wealth is a negative thing. | ||
| It is not. | ||
| If you work your ass off in this country, Dave, you should be able to reap the benefits of that hard work. | ||
| Everybody in this country believes in that. | ||
| And yet you have people who are articulating the adverse. | ||
| And the adverse is let the government. | ||
| Control everything. | ||
| The government doesn't have a predictive model of knowing what the cost of a good should be today versus tomorrow. | ||
| The government doesn't have a good predictive model of how many jobs you need tomorrow versus next year compared to today. | ||
| The free market is the best predictor of all of those things, and it is why individuals like the co-founder of Ben& Jerry's is worth $300-plus million. | ||
| It is why Bernie Sanders, after writing a couple of books, is now able to buy private and buy a beach home. | ||
| It is why that I would imagine in a couple of years, if she isn't already there, AOC herself was a millionaire. | ||
| It is because of capitalism and the free exchange that we have modeled for the rest of the world in this country. | ||
| Let's be for success. | ||
| That's where I think most of the American people are. | ||
| And speaking of capitalism, although he does not own Ben& Jerry's anymore, might I recommend Tillamook? | ||
| Have you ever had Tillamook ice cream? | ||
| They're killing it. | ||
| Tillamook is good as hell, man. | ||
| I love their strawberry ice cream. | ||
| They know how to do it. | ||
| Now, I just want to jump on to, I got two more segments for you, but before, I just want to clarify here. | ||
| You are black, according to the paperwork in front of me. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I mean, unless your audience is as blind as Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, I would think that's probably the case. | ||
| Okay, I just wanted to confirm because here is Representative Ayanna Pressley. | ||
| Demanding reparations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
- And discrimination against black people. | |
| We are in a moment of anti-blackness on steroids and we refuse to be silent. | ||
| We will not back down in our pursuit of racial justice. | ||
| The antidote to anti-blackness is to be pro-black and we will do it unapologetically. | ||
| The United States government owes us a debt and we need reparations. | ||
| - Now. | ||
| - I'm actually unclear as to whether we sped that up or she actually sounds like a chipmunk, but either way. | ||
| - They'll be fast. | ||
| Sure, Michael. | ||
| Again, you appear to be black. | ||
| I am white. | ||
| How much of my money would you like? | ||
| I don't want any of it. | ||
| That's why I worked my butt off to earn my own money. | ||
| Look, if you're going to have a historic conversation about reparations, did the country promise something 200 years ago to my ancestors? | ||
| They did. | ||
| Did the country renege on the promise they did? | ||
| Dave, I think we can all acknowledge that, right? | ||
| That occurred 200 years ago. | ||
| But I'm not a slave. | ||
| My grandparents went through segregation. | ||
| I talk to them often about this. | ||
| My grandmother was one of the first few in the South to desegregate her high school. | ||
| I think she was the second class actually to go after the first class that desegregated a high school in Louisiana. | ||
| And so I understand in real time the impacts of discrimination and what that could do to a people, to a family. | ||
| And with that said, my grandmother always had the mindset, just like my grandfather and others in my family, we went through this so that you wouldn't have to. | ||
| And we worked hard to get degrees so that you could see with hard work, with perseverance, this is what the outcome can be and will be. | ||
| And so when I have these conversations with other Black people who differ from me on this perspective, I understand where they're coming from. | ||
| But I always say, guys, that's likely not going to happen. | ||
| I just got to be honest. | ||
| That's likely not going to happen. | ||
| And so then what is the alternative? | ||
| How do we assure that younger Black men and younger Black women have the academic opportunities that they deserve, have the economic opportunities that they deserve so that they can be contributing members to society? | ||
| Let's focus more on academics. | ||
| Let's focus more on having a strong nuclear family the way we used to in our community. | ||
| We know what the end result of that actually was then, and we know what the end result will still be today. | ||
| So I think there's some different things that we could focus on, Dave, to increase. | ||
| Black success academically. | ||
| And that doesn't just mean getting a college degree. | ||
| That also means opening the flood doors of people getting trades again. | ||
| Black women, to their credit, they're doing exceptionally well in terms of their academic pursuits. | ||
| Black men is a different story, Dave. | ||
| And this is something that I really, really worry about. | ||
| We're seeing black men and men writ large in this country recede. | ||
| In terms of being competitive in the workforce. | ||
| So this isn't something that should just concern me as a black person, although per capita our numbers are a bit more alarming. | ||
| If you're a white person, if you're a Latino person and you have a son or you have a grandson or nephew, you should be worried about the trajectory of young men in this country across the board because the future doesn't look great for any of us. | ||
| And so I'm of the mindset of trying to figure out, Dave, how we lift all boats. | ||
| Are there some people, like people in my community, where the numbers are a bit more alarming? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think if you fix those numbers, they aren't just beneficial to black people, they're beneficial to the entire country writ large, because that means you're going to have safer communities. | ||
| That means you're going to have less people reliant on social safety nets in the long run or in the long term. | ||
| Those things benefit every single one of us, regardless of our race. | ||
| And so my advice on this would be... | ||
| Democrats, Republicans, white or black, let's all come together and figure out a way to build a cohesive system that yields to the benefit for everybody versus some of us. | ||
| I think you'd get bipartisan support across the board if that was the mentality. | ||
| Yeah, unleash the economy and give opportunity to people and get the government out of the way. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But let me ask you one other thing on this, which to me, it's also a part sort of, and I think you're referencing this in some sense, like mindset more than money. | ||
| The problem is that even if there was some... | ||
| To give reparations, you still will never make everybody happy. | ||
| Because what are you going to say? | ||
| Okay, it's $20,000 a person. | ||
| Is it 50? | ||
| Is it 100? | ||
| So no one will ever agree on the number. | ||
| And then you go two generations past it and people will say, wait a minute, they bought out my grandparents for $100,000 or whatever it is. | ||
| So it just perpetuates something that I think it's basically like throwing money into a bottomless pit in some sense, because you're never going to satisfy everybody, nor solve... | ||
| The actual racism that may exist. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think that's a good point. | ||
| The best way to give an opportunity, from my perspective, to African Americans who are on the lower end of the economic spectrum is to unleash opportunities in terms of education. | ||
| If you start with education, Thomas Sowell has written a lot about this. | ||
| There are even some on the liberal side, not today, but in the past that used to talk a lot about this. | ||
| If you start with education, you enable an individual to be competitive in... | ||
| The workforce, whether it's starting their own business, whether it's working for a major corporation, which less of us, if you're a millennial or a Gen Z, are less of us really doing that. | ||
| We're sort of doing multiple jobs at once. | ||
| But education really is the freeing thing that allows everybody to explore and try any and everything they want. | ||
| And if you don't have that pedigree, even if you give someone a lot of money, even if you give them access to any and everything, They're not going to have the knowledge to know, well, what should I do with this? | ||
| And I'm not saying this in a disparaging way. | ||
| I'm just simply trying to make the point that I really want to focus on giving more of an academic opportunity to as many black kids and as many poor kids in general as I possibly can to say, if we can unshackle the chains in your mind and allow you to see what you're capable of doing. | ||
| Then you really can maybe one day become one of the richest people in the world, and maybe you will go on and build a solid net worth, take care of your family, and give back to your community, which I believe a lot of people want to do. | ||
| And even, Dave, I'll say this. | ||
| We've talked a lot in this country about the diversity and equity stuff, and I know a lot of people fall in a lot of different ways. | ||
| And I have argued, and I'd love to know your perspective on this, I think there's an opportunity for conservatives as we have this conversation. | ||
| When you look at what occurred in the past, To African-Americans in particular, which is a very unique scenario. | ||
| What black people in the past had to overcome once they became free, even going through segregation, was really momentous. | ||
| There's not a lot of people, I would personally argue, could have overcome those things. | ||
| And you have black lawyers, black doctors, school teachers, some of the first congressmen in the House and in the Senate were Republicans, by the way, were African-Americans. | ||
| And they had to overcome things that I, as a 34-year-old black man, I just can't fathom beyond what I've read or what I remember from my great-grandmother when she was still living or some of the stories my grandparents share with me. | ||
| That is the type of merit that a person has to have to overcome all of those things. | ||
| And so I think as a conservative, when we're talking about, hey, we want a merit-based society, I think we have an opportunity here, Dave, to say... | ||
| Let's look at history. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What African-Americans had to overcome. | ||
| No one gave them anything in those days, Dave. | ||
| We can admit that. | ||
| But think about the merit, the hard work, the perseverance, the never giving up spirit. | ||
| The can-do belief that they had to have and ethos that they had to maintain to overcome all of those really, really bad things that we all acknowledge to get to where they came. | ||
| We want to instill those values, not only just in African Americans today, but in all Americans moving forward. | ||
| There is something beautiful to me in that argument about looking at that story of hard work and perseverance, despite some horrendous odds, how we can look at that and say, wow, if they did it... | ||
| Imagine what in the heck we can do with the opportunities today. | ||
| I think that is so right. | ||
| That is the answer. | ||
| And I would say take a little tip. | ||
| From the Jews. | ||
| Look, the Jews are getting hit in every which direction right now, but the Jews' secret is knowing their history and knowing where they came from and wandering through the desert and being pogromed and holocausted and Inquisition and all of those things, but still being here and still, because of knowing their history and celebrating the history, even the bad stuff, knowing how to succeed. | ||
| So that strikes me as a beautiful ending to the show. | ||
| I've been given the signal you can come back at least one more time. | ||
| They're still pissed about the burger thing. | ||
| It's a little confusion. | ||
| We'll talk about that at lunch. | ||
| What's up with McDonald's, man? | ||
| Even the president loves McDonald's. | ||
| Come on, what's up with your staff at McDonald's? | ||
| We're burger elitists here. | ||
| We're burger elitists. | ||
| Look, In-N-Out Burgers, I'm not against In-N-Out Burger. | ||
| They make some great hamburgers. | ||
| There are five guys. | ||
| Hey, I love five guys. | ||
| They have good burgers as well. | ||
| But Dave, there's something that is so Americana about it. | ||
| Just an old-school double cheeseburger, man. | ||
| A large fry and a strawberry milkshake. | ||
| It doesn't get any more American than that. | ||
| Just don't watch the freaking video I saw on Instagram of how they make those chicken nuggets. | ||
| I was having nightmares. | ||
| Why do you got to do that to me, Dave? | ||
| Why do you got to do that to me, man? | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks a lot, man. | ||
| We'll have you back for sure. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And for everybody else, have a great weekend. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| And for everybody else, have a great weekend. | ||
| And we do have a post-game show today. | ||
| We usually don't on Fridays, but we do. | ||
| RubenReport.Locals.com in about 30 seconds. |
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