Oct. 3, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
25:23
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, everybody, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report, and in lieu of a Friday round table extravaganza, I have legendary director. | ||
| That's right, I'm calling you a legend. | ||
| Dinesh D'Souza in studio with me, co-hosting the show today. | ||
| We're going to talk about your new film, which I watched this morning, uh, which was absolutely fantastic, The Dragon's Prophecy, and we're going to catch up on the news and all that stuff. | ||
| But before we do any of that, you mentioned to me right before that, right before we started filming, that you live in Houston. | ||
| We're here in Miami. | ||
| It's a lot of it's a lot of sweat. | ||
| You feel are you happier coming to Miami or is this worse? | ||
| No, which is worse. | ||
| Well, my it's, you know, it's transitioning to fall, so it's a little milder in Miami. | ||
| Look, uh, you know, the tropical look of Miami can't beat that. | ||
| You we don't have that in Houston. | ||
| Uh we have the humidity, but you know, Debbie, my wife and I, we joke, she was born in Venezuela. | ||
| I was born in Bombay. | ||
| So we grew up in really hot countries. | ||
| So you guys are fine. | ||
| So we're we're fine. | ||
| Good, good. | ||
| Well, listen, I watched the film this morning. | ||
| I was usually uh I am able to watch just a short snippet of something before I do an interview, but I saw your interview with Roseanne Barr a few days ago, and the way she was talking about the film, I thought I have to watch the whole thing. | ||
| And I watched it this morning. | ||
| I mean, it's absolutely, absolutely wonderful. | ||
| So why don't we first? | ||
| So we'll show you a m a quick uh shot of the movie poster uh before we get into anything. | ||
| And obviously, people are going to recognize several of those people besides uh just you on that on that poster right there, Eric Mataxis, of course, who's been on the show and Bibi Netanyahu and Mike Huckabee, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| And let's show let's show a quick portion. | ||
| This is just a small portion, about a minute of the trailer. | ||
| We'll get into that. | ||
| And then we're going to connect. | ||
| I mean, it's the fact that the movie is coming out in theaters on Monday, as you mentioned. | ||
| It'll be streaming next Thursday. | ||
| Uh, but it is so timely relative to so many things happening right now, which I don't know if that was coincidence or happenstance or what. | ||
| Let's take a look at the trailer and then we'll pick it up on the other side. | ||
| October 7th was the devil's holiday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very hard to believe what happened, even though I was there and seen with my own eyes and seeing them laughing and killing and having fun with it. | |
| Because if you don't open the door, they are going to kill you and are going to kill me, so please open the door. | ||
| So who are the Jews? | ||
| Who are the Palestinians? | ||
| And whose land is it really? | ||
| Could the fate of the world of humanity itself be somehow tied to this place? | ||
| The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation. | ||
| So what if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel? | ||
| The Bible speaks about this whole war as a dragon representing the enemy, attacking a woman representing Israel. | ||
| Okay, so I think fairly obviously people can see why this is timely and why it's important and all of those things. | ||
| So first off, where where did the idea for the film come from? | ||
| And then are you just kind of lucky that was the plan that it will come out around the second anniversary of October 7th? | ||
| Obviously, you didn't know all of the geopolitical stuff that was gonna happen. | ||
| The fact that Trump has now offered this, you know, peace plan that uh Israel has accepted Hamas now sounds like they're not accepting. | ||
| There's just a lot of things going on in the world that connect directly back to this. | ||
| The film is a it's a departure for me in the sense that you know my films and really all of them in one way or another are about the meaning of America. | ||
| Uh with this film, it actually began. | ||
| I've long wanted to do a film on sort of Christian apologetics. | ||
| I went to Israel for the first time at the end of 2022, and I discovered that there's all this archaeology going on in which they're pulling out, you know, stones and clay seals and inscriptions out of the ground, and it's validating small details in the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, kind of showing that the Bible is not like Greek mythology. | ||
| It's in fact uh a document about real people and real events. | ||
| So I was very intrigued by all this, but kind of put it to the side. | ||
| Nine months later, October 7th. | ||
| And that's when I got the idea of doing a film that would sort of combine the politics, October 7th, the war, with biblical archaeology, and the link as I saw it was the ultimate question being whose land is it? | ||
| So the archaeology is good not just for authenticating the Bible, but for establishing the ancient presence of the Jews in that land. | ||
| And um then I came across this fellow Jonathan Khan, and uh I and he had this arresting idea that the battle between Israel and Hamas, Israel and the Palestinians, he said, is a kind of recreation of an ancient biblical conflict between the Israelites on the one hand and their longtime enemies, the Philistines. | ||
| And then he goes on, not just to say that the Philistines, the Palestinians, it's the same name. | ||
| He goes on to show the tactics of the same. | ||
| He draws out this parallel in a very fascinating way. | ||
| And then my wife is on a telegram channel where she's collecting all the footage of October 7th, and I begin to realize no one has seen this stuff. | ||
| Uh apparently the Israeli government decided we're not going to be pushing it out there, we're going to show it to select journalists, but the consequences people know about October 7th, but they don't have that feeling of having been there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So just to be totally here, because I did see the 47-minute video at a at an army base in Israel, the stuff that most people have seen is not the worst of the worst. | ||
| Because that's what they didn't want out of respect for the family members of those who were killed and everything else. | ||
| I mean, there are literally, well, I'm sure you've seen it, that you have some of it in the film, but watching the man be beheaded with the Hamas guy smiling and laughing, that wasn't the worst of it. | ||
| I mean, there were things that were worse than that, that the two kids running into the bomb shelter, the follow father following them, and then the guy just throws the bomb in, you see them all stumble out and die right there, and he's laughing. | ||
| I mean, it's it's it's off the charts insane. | ||
| It's off the charts insane. | ||
| What I found from a cinematic point of view, and this is putting my movie hat on, is I said, look, what's really fascinating here is this is filmed by the attackers. | ||
| So you're not going to see it from the point of view of the kibbutzes with the terrorists approaching. | ||
| It's almost like I'm going to put the audience on a motorcycle with a GoPro, and you get to ride over the fence into the kibbutzes from the Hamas side. | ||
| Not almost literally. | ||
| No, literally. | ||
| Literally, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this is not recreations. | ||
| This is actually the opening 10 minutes of the film, and some of the most brutal stuff is not in there. | ||
| But there's enough to give you a, and this is my filmmaking technique, right? | ||
| If I go back to 2,000 mules, I don't want to tell you about election fraud. | ||
| I want to kind of put you on the scene. | ||
| You see a guy pull up in a car at night, he's got a backpack full of ballots. | ||
| You know, make up your own mind. | ||
| Uh and similarly here. | ||
| Um, and I I think a lot of the reason why October 7th has not resonated emotionally with enough people, is they just haven't seen it. | ||
| And so that's how the film begins. | ||
| Um I think what's different for me is not only the topic. | ||
| This is my first film that is about Israel, about the Middle East, but it is also the fact that I'm integrating the political with the spiritual, the biblical, uh, and even a hint of the apocalyptic, in other words, Bible prophecy. | ||
| I think it's a very tantalizing combination, and it works in this case. | ||
| So that's why I really liked it, because I thought going in that I was watching something that was going to be a little more political, but it actually is much more spiritual, and then I can I guess you could say historically driven. | ||
| I mean, you go to the city of David, and sorry, what's the guy's name again, Zev? | ||
| Zev Ornstein. | ||
| Zev Morstein, who I did the dig at the city of David. | ||
| Maybe you want to tell people what the city of David is and the excavation they're doing there and how that's connected to all this. | ||
| Because it's rather extreme. | ||
| I mean, you walk in the footsteps of Jesus without without question, actually. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, it the City of David is um, well, it's built right around David's palace. | ||
| And you know, this is how this archaeology is, and how and this is what first piqued my interest. | ||
| So the renowned archaeologist Elat Mazar comes to the these folks at the City of David, a foundation that does archaeology, and she says, you have to move your office. | ||
| And uh so they go, why? | ||
| She goes, because the palace of King David. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| This is 3,000 years ago, and until recently, people didn't even people disputed whether D David even existed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| His actual palace is underneath your feet. | ||
| Uh and they go, how is a mall over there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's right. | ||
| And and they go, well, how on earth would you know that? | ||
| And listen to this. | ||
| So she goes, she opens the old testament to the book of Samuel, and she goes, look over here. | ||
| It says that David invited the Phoenicians, King Hiram of Tyre to send carpenters and stonemasons to build his palace. | ||
| David could not build a palace. | ||
| He brought in the experts, the Phoenicians, and El Art Mazar goes, We found a Phoenician artifact, a capital, the top part of a pillar, right here. | ||
| And so I'm going to infer that that's because the Phoenicians were here and they were building David's palace. | ||
| Sure enough, you dig, out come these giant walls, these giant pillars. | ||
| So some people even to this day dispute, was it a palace? | ||
| Was it a royal administrative center? | ||
| Well, it was clearly some massive monumental structure as the archaeologists call it. | ||
| So and then the pilgrimage road, which is the ancient road linking the pool of Salo. | ||
| I mean, the pool of Saloon is important because millions of Jews over the centuries have ritually bathed in it. | ||
| It's the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and then there's a half-mile pilgrimage road leading to the temple. | ||
| So I asked Zev. | ||
| And that's large. | ||
| So what people need to understand, though, is that's largely underground still. | ||
| I mean, now it's being excavated, but it's basically almost under the old city of Jerusalem, sort of leading to it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so when they did the archaeology, they had to, they had to preserve the road above. | ||
| This is underground archaeology, an incredible archaeological project. | ||
| But I asked Zeb, I go, Well, what is the probability that Jesus walked on that road? | ||
| And you know, in Jerusalem and in Israel generally, there are some archaeological sites disputed, like the road to Calvary. | ||
| Some people go it's over here, some people go it's over there. | ||
| But in this case, Zev says the probability is 100%. | ||
| Because all the out-of-town Jews, so to speak, didn't have their own private bats. | ||
| They had to come to this bath, uh, ritually cleanse themselves, go to the temple. | ||
| So the scenes right out of the Bible, old and new testament both, kind of spring to life. | ||
| Uh, and the reason I have that in the film is because Jonathan Kahn gives an exposition kind of from a biblical point of view. | ||
| But I have also a secular audience that's gonna go, well, gee, how do we know that Pontius Pilate or Jeremiah, Isaiah, King Day? | ||
| How do we know these are real people? | ||
| So the archaeological section is a way of saying, guess what? | ||
| I I couldn't answer that question 50 years ago, but now I can. | ||
| Um, and I even offer the tantalizing idea that as the world is becoming more secular, sort of God is speaking back and speaking back through the language of science. | ||
| That's what makes this so powerful. | ||
| It's you look at a seal, it's a clay seal, it has the name of some obscure guy in the Bible mentioned only once, and then you go, well, all the people who've been telling me for a hundred years that the Bible was written centuries later, they wouldn't have known about this guy. | ||
| This guy was the royal steward to King Josiah in like the sixth century BC. | ||
| Is that the weirdest part of what connects it to the political part, which is that the deeper you go down, the more you find out. | ||
| And that doesn't seem to match the narrative of what mo of whatever you want to call them, the anti-Israel set want you to believe that the facts are literally right there. | ||
| Well, uh I mean, think about it. | ||
| The main left-wing critique of Israel is that the the Jews are colonizers. | ||
| Now, first of all, how do you colonize your own land? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| This is like accusing the Irish of colonizing Ireland, the Indians of colonizing India. | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| Um, not only that, but it's quite obvious that the colonization, to the degree that there is one, is from the Islamic side. | ||
| Right in the middle of Jerusalem is the site of the Solomonic temple built by Solomon, later rebuilt by Herod, the second temple. | ||
| Uh, this is supposedly on the site where Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac. | ||
| So is the it is far and away the holiest site in Judaism and Christianity. | ||
| And yet, what is sitting on top of it right now, a an Islamic conquest arch known as the Dome of the Rock, and adjoining it, the Alaksa Mosque. | ||
| So not only is this a sign of the Muslims basically saying, We're here now and we've taken it over, uh, they would have been happy to have been called colonizers. | ||
| They were very proud of it, kind of like Hamas was really proud of October 7th. | ||
| Um, but we also look at it in a deeper sense, it's almost as if there is um there is a an endless war raging between God and the devil. | ||
| And the theme of the film is that the devil imitates God. | ||
| He inverts God's strategy. | ||
| And so, what is more wonderful for the devil than to take the holiest site in Judaism and Christianity and go sit on top of it? | ||
| And that is exactly what he's doing right now. | ||
| So that is a perfect segue to this segment, uh, this portion that I wanted to show people where you ask commentator Eric Stackelbeck about the uniqueness as it pertains to anti-Semitism, because that obviously is connected to a lot of the hatred of Israel. | ||
| Let's say take a look. | ||
| What do you make, Eric, of anti-Semitism? | ||
| It seems to be a cousin of racism. | ||
| And yet it's different in racism, there's an effort by a group of people to say, I'm up here and you're down there. | ||
| You're inferior to me. | ||
| But that's hard to say about the Jews because they are far and away the most successful tribe in world history. | ||
| So anti-Semitism is not simply a looking down on the Jews, but in some weird way it's a looking up to the Jews. | ||
| It's the world's oldest hatred, certainly demonic, a spiritual driver to it, but much of it is based on envy. | ||
| People have asked why the Jews, the devil hates the Jewish people. | ||
| Because they represent the existence of God. | ||
| You can't explain the existence and the rebirth of Israel without bringing God into the picture. | ||
| Where else in human history have we seen a people after two thousand years of disbursement, they return to that homeland? | ||
| They revive the Hebrew language and it's in regular use for the first time in 2500 years. | ||
| And you're saying it has to be a miracle. | ||
| It's a miracle. | ||
| So then is Israel just the now the avatar for all the hatred because it became a ridiculously successful, safe, largely safe, I should say, flourishing society that is the envy of much of that part of the world, and perhaps now what we're seeing across the Western world. | ||
| So I think, and I think Eric alludes to this, there is a natural and a supernatural dimension to it. | ||
| And let's take a moment on each. | ||
| The natural dimension is in fact that anti-Semitism is a disguised form of envy. | ||
| The guy who's doing badly in the world likes to say that the Jews are doing better than his group, not because they are smarter, not because they work harder, not because they are more industrious, not because they they study more, not because they have more Nobel laureates and have made more discoveries. | ||
| Uh it's because they are uniquely wicked. | ||
| Uh they are willing to stoop to things that I I and my group, the virtuous group would never stoop to. | ||
| So this is the natural human explanation. | ||
| And it applies not exclusively to Jews, other successful tribes get kind of the same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The supernatural explanation I think is worth adding to it because I think the natural explanation by itself is not, doesn't give the full account of it. | ||
| Uh the supernatural explanation is this: that going back to the very beginning, the rebel angels in heaven, God is fighting and the and the devil. | ||
| The devil can never defeat God. | ||
| And so the devil develops a new strategy, which is to pick on the things that God cares about. | ||
| So, like why does in Genesis 1, why does the devil tempt Adam and Eve? | ||
| What has he got against Adam and Eve? | ||
| What have Adam and Eve done to him? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| But his idea is that if I can ruin God's creation, I get the last laugh on God. | ||
| That's my ultimate revenge. | ||
| And God, and in a sense, the devil picks on the Jews for the exact same reason. | ||
| And the Jews are the people of God. | ||
| If the and by the people of God here I mean, I don't mean chosenness in some esoteric sense. | ||
| I just mean this is the instrument by which we get the new we get the Ten Commandments, the law, the prophets. | ||
| Uh so the Jews are witnesses in a way to God in that sense, right? | ||
| So if that's the case, the devil goes, okay, I need to ruin those people. | ||
| How do I do it? | ||
| First of all, I push them out from the river to the sea, I get rid of them. | ||
| And number two, I go occupy their holiest place, and I declared off limits, uh, and the Jews can't worship at the side of their of their own temple except at the except at the wailing wall. | ||
| So the idea here is that the Jews, and by extension, the Christians, because the Christians are, you know, Jesus, uh pr we present ourselves as spiritual Israelites. | ||
| We are engrafted onto the Jewish covenant. | ||
| That's how the New Testament relates to the old. | ||
| So if the Bible is right, you would expect to see now, in a kind of end times or the last age, an increased hostility to the Jews and increased persecution of the Christians. | ||
| And not only is that what we see, It's coming from the same people. | ||
| And I don't just mean it's the radical Muslims on the one hand, but notice it's also coming from the secular left. | ||
| The secular left hates Israel. | ||
| The secular left hates the Christians. | ||
| And the radical Muslims and the secular left who would not seem to have a lot in common. | ||
| Like, what does an LGBTQ guy have, you know, in common with he's not going to move to Gaza, his life isn't going to be that good. | ||
| And similarly, you can't take a bunch of, you know, jihadis and put them at the Folsom street fair. | ||
| They're not going to fit in so well. | ||
| So these this odd uh strange bedfellows are united by hatred of the Jews and the Christians. | ||
| And I think so. | ||
| This is where the movie comes out. | ||
| The Jews and the Christians need to come together. | ||
| The Christians and Israel need to come together, recognizing that we have a common adversary in both radical Islam and in the secular left. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's actually one of the best explanations of the red green alliance that I've ever heard. | ||
| There's a there's obviously a religious portion of it that's mostly coming from radical Islam. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then the hyper-secular version of it is what the left now is, which is just we hate Western society, that thing represents Western society. | ||
| Let's go all in. | ||
| And the way that the West the left uh incorporates this is they treat the radical Muslims as another ethnic group. | ||
| So the left says, all right, we got the we got the blacks over here, we got the feminists over there, we got the LGBTQ over here. | ||
| All right, then here we have the Ilhan Omar people, the Mamdani people, um, you know, uh the illegals who have come in from Iran, uh, they're gonna be just one more constituency group, and we will treat them in that way. | ||
| It's it's a very dangerous game they're playing, but they the left thinks we can incorporate them. | ||
| The radical Muslims think we don't have very good entree into this society. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The left will let us into the boardrooms, they will get us, uh they will connect us with George Soros and all the other people we need to meet. | ||
| So it's the alliance has worked out for both sides. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The the unfortunately for the lefties, they just get beheaded a l a little lower on the neck, right? | ||
| I mean they decided to bury their head in the sand a bit more, but the beheading still ends up coming. | ||
| So clearly people can see how this is connected to so much of what's going on. | ||
| Let me just ask you one other question, then we'll connect this to some of the news of the week, which I don't want you to give away the full conclusion of the movie per se. | ||
| But are you hopeful there's a way out of a seemingly intractable problem that's a political problem, but now you're also arguing is a spiritual problem, let's say. | ||
| Yeah, I think it needs to be dealt with at both levels. | ||
| I mean, my reason for having that in Yahoo in the film, for example, is to talk politics. | ||
| Um, but I also ask him questions like, what do you think of Jesus? | ||
| You know, and I and I think he uh very interestingly talks about the Jewishness of Jesus. | ||
| Uh and um the fact, and you know, these days, of course, the left is trying to say Jesus was a Palestinian or uh so um there is a political solution. | ||
| What you have here with the political solution is you know, Trump comes in and he'll say something that seems on the face of it absurd. | ||
| Gaza needs to be another um Riviera. | ||
| People laugh, they go, this guy doesn't even know what he's talking about. | ||
| But Trump is like a real estate guy, right? | ||
| He looks at the rubble and he goes, you know, I see some opportunities for some new buildings and clean streets and safe neighborhoods and people going to work and high-tech companies and prosperity. | ||
| So let's offer these people another road. | ||
| They may not take it, they may be too twisted, they may be too indoctrinated, uh, they may love blood, um, but at least they are giving given an option. | ||
| I think that's really what's on the table here. | ||
| Now, the spiritual side of it, I think is is very important and is particularly relevant after Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Um, and that is the sort of mood of renewal of a need for us to connect the political to the moral to the spiritual. | ||
| And I think this film actually fits that mood very well. | ||
| Because where the film comes out, and I don't mind giving away the ending in these kinds of films, the the plot, so to speak, is not key, it's the experience of the film. | ||
| The the ending is basically saying this look, if if if God is raised back the Jews and brought them back to their ancestral homeland, and if the devil has decided, let me recreate in a modern way the enemies of Israel, the Philistines, You know, the Moabites, the Malachites. | ||
| So if things are going back, then we have to go back. | ||
| And by we, I mean the Jews are going back, right? | ||
| You've got you've got young 19-year-olds and 22-year-olds in in Israel, and they're putting on the armor of the ancient Israelites. | ||
| And the message of the film is, hey Christians, we need to do the same thing. | ||
| We need to go back to the way Christians were in the book of Acts. | ||
| I mean, the main difference, I think, between Christianity and Islam right now in the world, Islam has not lost the force of its original revelation. | ||
| Christianity in many ways has. | ||
| And so the renewal, I think, is to is to recover that, to recover the kind of energy of the early apostles who are on fire for the faith. | ||
| Now there are Christians like this, by the way, in Nigeria. | ||
| This is why the radical Muslims want to behead them. | ||
| Because Islam is spreading basically by having eight kids, and Christianity is spreading by conversion. | ||
| So it's a competition. | ||
| And the Muslims are worried about it and they want to stop it. | ||
| Do you think that Christian revival is the only thing that will stop radical Islam throughout the West? | ||
| I mean, we're going to get to what happened in Manchester yesterday yesterday in just a second. | ||
| But I mean, I see no other way, sort of for Europe to combat what's happening. | ||
| I think it's a necessary part, and I would put it philosophically in this framework. | ||
| Athens and Jerusalem, neither one can stand by itself. | ||
| These are the two pillars of the West. | ||
| Now, Athens at some level doesn't need a defense, right? | ||
| It's Socrates, it's Marcus Aurelius, it is the Greek theater, it's Pericles and the foundations of democracy. | ||
| But Athens has always been nourished and sustained by Jerusalem, which is Abraham and Moses and the prophetic tradition and the idea of a moral law that is outside of us, not merely inwardly generated, that puts claims on us. | ||
| And uh and I think the founders would have said that the good life is to combine both. | ||
| That was the uh those were the the sort of uh that was the soil of the American uh founding. | ||
| So the um the restoration of the West requires, I think, a revival of Jerusalem, um, even more so than Athens. | ||
| And Athens ultimately needs to be saved by Jerusalem. | ||
| Uh the way it was in the history of the West. | ||
| I mean, when we read Aristotle uh and when we read Socrates, we're actually not getting the ancient Greeks the way they were. | ||
| The ancient Greek society was incredibly bloodthirsty. | ||
| It had widespread slavery, it was brutal in a manner that we would find unendurable today. | ||
| We get, when we go to, you know, we go to Yale and Dartmouth, we study Greece as filtered through Jerusalem. | ||
| Although Yale and Dormit are getting bloody again. | ||
| Yeah, that's in some respect, although it's a different thing altogether. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |
Export Selection