Oct. 25, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
18:30
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| I'm very happy to be in a place in a country and certainly at a conference where I can say the word liberal and you guys know what it means because yeah from an American perspective if I say to someone that I'm a liberal and I wrote a book, | ||
| my first book Don't Burn This Book, I think is the best-selling book on classical liberalism in the last 40 years in America, but if I tell people I'm a liberal, they think that means a progressive, they think that means a leftist, and the word has just been completely mangled. | ||
| So it's very refreshing to come here and even talk to some of your members of parliament who are in the liberal party. | ||
| And in essence, they have a lot more in common with the conservatives of America. | ||
| That's much of what we will talk about up here tonight. | ||
| So I thought if we're going to talk about the right and where does liberty fit in this new right, and most of this, of course, I'll do from an American perspective, but a lot of it obviously translates to Australia. | ||
| I think we have to start by talking about what happened to the left. | ||
| And the reason we have to do that is because so much of what defines the right today, what defines MAGA, what defines Trump, what defines really the conservative movement, is a reaction to the excesses of the left. | ||
| So, you know, there's always a conversation about when did the left gain all this power? | ||
| How did they do it? | ||
| Most of the answers, usually there was a sort of 40-year march through the institutions that most of you are aware of. | ||
| They really just took over higher education. | ||
| They moved down into high schools and then really into middle schools and even elementary schools. | ||
| And that's, of course, where we got all of this woke stuff and the gender identity stuff and the, I would say, upending of our history and confusion around why America is fundamentally good and what our values are and all of these things. | ||
| And they did it. | ||
| And not only did they do it, while I would say conservative leaning people, or in this country I can say some of the good liberals, were out there building businesses and building families and actually doing things, changing industries, all of these things. | ||
| And the progressives were very committed to the cause. | ||
| And I think that that really is how they, in essence, destroyed or overtook the Democrat Party in America, because the good liberals, which I suspect most of you in this room probably, from an American perspective 20 years ago, would have been Democrats, maybe sort of Bill Clinton Democrats, something like that. | ||
| And that was sort of the mainstream take on liberalism. | ||
| But the progressives came in and they basically, they were sort of liberals on steroids, right? | ||
| Probably a little too many steroids. | ||
| And they went in and they decided they would scream about everything. | ||
| And everyone that disagreed with them was a racist and a bigot and a homophobe and all of the slurs. | ||
| And it kind of worked. | ||
| Actually, more than that. | ||
| It more than kind of worked. | ||
| It fully worked. | ||
| They have in essence, at this point, in 2025, purged all of the good liberals and pushed them to the right. | ||
| So for the purposes of today's talk, we're talking about what's going on on the right. | ||
| And I'm really fascinated by this because I was a person of the left. | ||
| I was in a lot of progressive circles. | ||
| And about 10 years ago, I started saying, hey, liberals were not acting liberally. | ||
| We're not defending free speech. | ||
| We're silencing people. | ||
| This was at the beginning of, you know, cancel culture and wokeness and all of these things. | ||
| And there was a real feeling that all the liberals were going to sort of be lost because the progressives were taking over the Democrat Party and the liberals would have nowhere to go because they would never team up with the conservatives. | ||
| But then something amazing happened around 2016, really 2015, and that was Donald Trump. | ||
| And Donald Trump came in, and he was a Republican, so he was a conservative, but everyone knew he really wasn't a conservative, right? | ||
| I mean, no one in their right mind, I think, thinks that Donald Trump is sort of a religious conservative, that he was sort of a New York liberal real estate guy, you know, spoke roughly, had to do all sorts of things in his previous life as a businessman and a TV host and all of those things. | ||
| And he then came in and he actually, and this is a point I've really tried to make to a lot of people, and I think they get it, but it takes some time. | ||
| He actually liberalized the conservative party. | ||
| That's actually what MAGA is. | ||
| Make America Great Again, really, is that he took the conservatives, who were kind of okay with just losing elections and not really doing much. | ||
| We do some nation building across the world. | ||
| We do some tax cuts, things like that. | ||
| But then he actually widened the tent. | ||
| He widened the tent. | ||
| One example would be that he is the first incoming first-time president who was ever for marriage equality. | ||
| Now, that certainly is not a conservative principle at all, right? | ||
| Barack Obama, liberal, progressive hero, when he came in first time around, he was not for marriage equality. | ||
| So in that sense, Donald Trump was more liberal, actually, than Barack Obama. | ||
| Donald Trump also, you know, he's been for, sometimes he's for tax cuts, sometimes he's for spending bills. | ||
| He basically has been a big mix of things, but what did that do? | ||
| It basically gave a home to the disaffected liberals, right? | ||
| So when I talk about the disaffected liberals, if you just look at some of the people in Donald Trump's cabinet right now, he has Bobby Kennedy running HHS, Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| I mean, his last name, Kennedy. | ||
| This is a Democrat. | ||
| He is supposed to be a Democrat. | ||
| As a matter of fact, when I had him on my show when he was running just in this last election, or he was running in the primary, which the Democrats basically made sure that there was no chance that he was going to beat Biden in the primaries, I had him on my show, and it was the first time we met. | ||
| And I said to him, I said, Bobby, you know, I don't know if you're going to be a Republican by the end of this thing, but I promise you you will not be a Democrat. | ||
| And if you go back and watch the clip, you can see his eyes light up because he knew something was really, really rotten with the Democrat Party, that he as a liberal, as an old school liberal, limited government, laissez-faire economics, individual rights, all of the things that you guys believe in, he knew that the runway on that with this progressive movement was very, very short. | ||
| And he knew that Plain would never get off the ground because they simply would not follow him. | ||
| So somebody like Bobby Kennedy ends up in Donald Trump's cabinet. | ||
| Then you could look at Tulsi Gabbard. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard was a progressive. | ||
| She was a real progressive too. | ||
| She wasn't just a liberal. | ||
| I mean, she was on the left side of that. | ||
| And she ran for president in the primary against Joe Biden. | ||
| She was actually the last person, last candidate still going. | ||
| You know, they all cut their deals. | ||
| Pete Buttigieg and some of the other, Elizabeth Warren and the rest of them, Bernie Sanders. | ||
| They all cut their deals and they all dropped out on the same day. | ||
| But Tulsi Gabbard stayed in and she fought Joe Biden as long as she could. | ||
| Hillary Clinton said she was a Russian asset, all of that stuff. | ||
| But she was a Democrat. | ||
| She was a lefty and a liberal. | ||
| And now she is the director of national intelligence. | ||
| And there's many other people like this. | ||
| And Donald Trump also has brought in plenty of gay people and black people and all of the other things that don't really matter, of course. | ||
| And he didn't hire them or bring them into the cabinet because of their identity. | ||
| He brought them in because they're qualified. | ||
| And that is a fundamental difference than what the Democrats have done over the last couple of years, where they brought in people specifically. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Joe Biden said specifically that he brought in Kamala Harris as VP because she was a black woman, which is, from a liberal perspective, the most demeaning thing you could possibly say to someone, right? | ||
| Why would you ever want to be hired for a job because of your skin color and your gender? | ||
| It's completely and utterly irrelevant. | ||
| Are you qualified to do the job? | ||
| Now, from where I stand, she obviously was not qualified to do the job. | ||
| And I think that was sort of borne out in her VP tenure and then her subsequent campaign. | ||
| But as they purged all of these people, and as Donald Trump widened the magazine, that gets us to the topic today. | ||
| So how do we keep, hold a political movement that has very different perspectives, that has very different policy prescriptions. | ||
| You have these liberals that are generally a little more big government. | ||
| They want more social services. | ||
| They're obviously more liberal when it comes to, you know, let's say gay marriage, which the ship has sailed on that, so it almost feels silly to talk about, or abortion would be a good one. | ||
| You have now all of these people like Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. | ||
| I mean, think about Joe Rogan, who supported Donald Trump. | ||
| Joe Rogan is a pot-smoking, MMA-watching podcaster, right, mushroom-eating podcaster, who no one in their right mind, and probably a lot more than that, but nobody in their right mind would think is a conservative. | ||
| But he supported Donald Trump. | ||
| Elon Musk, probably the single best example. | ||
| Elon Musk, lifelong Democrat, until the midterms before this last election, had never voted Republican once. | ||
| Then finally, when he moved a bunch of his companies to Texas from California because of progressive Gavin Newsom, he finally voted for a Republican congressperson in his district, took all of his companies out of California, high taxes, high regulation, moves them to Texas. | ||
| I mean, that's the most perfect example of watching the entire country sort by politics right now. | ||
| but certainly would never, never have considered himself a Republican, and now he's in that tent. | ||
| So Elon Tulsi, Bobby, me, Rogan, all of these people that seven, ten years ago all were liberals are now part of the Republican Party. | ||
| And interestingly, if you were to look at the Democrat Party, and I also have to say it's quite fun coming here because you guys get all these references, right? | ||
| Like there's no political person from an American perspective that I can bring up that I think you guys don't know. | ||
| You're following all of it. | ||
| You know, everyone has now come across. | ||
| And the question really is, what's left on the Democrat side? | ||
| Is there any room for the Democrats to have liberals? | ||
| And there's basically one. | ||
| There's a guy by the name of John Fetterman, who is a, he's a Democrat from Pennsylvania. | ||
| This is a guy who quite literally, about five years ago, he had a couple strokes and had brain damage. | ||
| And as he has healed, as his brain has healed, he is becoming more conservative. | ||
| It's incredible to watch. | ||
| I don't know if any of you saw the movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. | ||
| It's literally that story. | ||
| He is coming out of the coma and suddenly he's like, I'm for limited government. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| But they're primarying him. | ||
| The Democrats are now primary the one moderate left in the party. | ||
| And then of course, you know, there's a couple people in Hollywood that are still, that still basically get it. | ||
| There's, you know, Bill Maher, who's, I think, been the standard bearer for American liberalism for the past 40 years. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think he gets to the wrong voting conclusion, but he's trying to stick it out with the Democrats. | ||
| But now, so what do you do on the right? | ||
| How do you defend individual rights? | ||
| How do you defend liberty? | ||
| How do you defend the things that we all care about when you're now sort of in bed with people that have different views? | ||
| This is where I should bring up my friend Charlie Kirk for a moment, because Charlie, who was a good friend of mine, and we met around 2017 and we did a lot of these college events together. | ||
| I was on the left and Charlie was on the right. | ||
| And we debated on stage at colleges. | ||
| It was before a lot of this stuff went crazy. | ||
| And when we were doing it, we would go to these colleges and everybody would say to us the same thing. | ||
| We would get the same criticism every single gig that we did, which was, oh, you know, you guys are making a big deal about this college thing. | ||
| But when these kids get out to the real world, you know, the real world will show them what's up. | ||
| And what we found was that the real world basically folded like a wet paper bag, right? | ||
| They actually got out of colleges. | ||
| They took over all of these institutions. | ||
| But Charlie did something really interesting, which is, and this is, I think, gets to the crux of the challenge that we will have to merge conservatives and liberals in a healthy way, which is really what the American experiment is all about. | ||
| And it's why I say that Donald Trump has been defending conservatism and liberalism from the forces on both sides that would pull us apart. | ||
| Charlie had his own personal religious beliefs, right? | ||
| He was an evangelical Christian. | ||
| He had his faith. | ||
| He talked about it very publicly, which is really not that welcomed in most American circles, certainly not in the mainstream. | ||
| So we had differences, right? | ||
| So he absolutely believed in traditional marriage. | ||
| He certainly was not thrilled when the Supreme Court changed the law on that. | ||
| But he also understood fundamentally that America was not a religious theocracy. | ||
| And that's more of the liberal side of him, that he could have his faith and then also understand that America was a secular society and that it's up to you personally to figure out how you integrate those two things. | ||
| Well, that's partly what I see the challenge will now be for the people on the right, because Donald Trump's 79 years old. | ||
| Obviously, this is going to be his last term. | ||
| And the Republican Party is going to have to figure out which way to go. | ||
| And there are forces pulling it in all sorts of ways right now. | ||
| It's quite bizarre, actually, because Donald Trump, he's only in the midst of the first year of this term. | ||
| So he's got three plus years to go. | ||
| I've personally been very happy with virtually everything that he's done. | ||
| But now there are forces in the media, and I would say within his own party, and this is, I would call this sort of like the Tucker-Carlson wing. | ||
| that really want to push America into much more of an isolationist position. | ||
| I think there's an awful lot of scapegoating going on and a bunch of other things that maybe we can get to in the Q ⁇ A. And Donald Trump, I think, has been a sort of buffer against that. | ||
| And if America is going to hold, and America is going to be a place where we can have all sorts of people from all walks of life, you know, one of the things that's most interesting to me being here in your incredible country is that Australia and the United States, we're basically geographically the same size. | ||
| But we have 350 million people. | ||
| As I understand it, you have about 27 million people. | ||
| Think about how crazy that is, the difference, just the density of the amount of people. | ||
| And then if you really think about how America, we were the place for the last, you know, we're rolling into our 250th anniversary next year. | ||
| We were the shining beacon in the world where everyone from literally every corner on earth wanted to come to to make a better life and largely did that. | ||
| But of course the exchange in that is that you're going to have people that have different religious beliefs. | ||
| You're going to have people that have different philosophic beliefs that are going to have different lifestyles and different foods and different color, you know, different clothing and music and all of these things. | ||
| And America, much, much better than Europe, integrated these people properly. | ||
| I think you guys have done it fairly well. | ||
| It seems, I have to say on this trip, it seems a little different in some of your cities. | ||
| I was in Melbourne and it felt like the integration situation was not going that well. | ||
| But I would need to be there a little bit more perhaps to see that. | ||
| But America has done that. | ||
| And that is the promise of liberalism. | ||
| And if the conservatives and the MAGA movement is to last, they are going to have to pick which way, which way are we going to go on this? | ||
| Are we going to be an America that is going to lead the world, that is going to defend liberal Western values, individual rights, universal human rights, or are we going to do something that is different? | ||
| And again, there are forces that want to turn America more into a sort of traditionally Christian country that want to do more. | ||
| There's a wing of the Republican Party. | ||
| I think you can see this with a little bit of the kind of Marjorie Taylor Greens and some of the other Congress people that want to turn it into something a little bit more actually like AOC or Bernie would want, where the government is going to do absolutely everything. | ||
| So Trump is basically trying to hold a very tenuous position. | ||
| How do we balance all of these things and keep the widest tent possible? | ||
| I honestly don't know if it's possible. | ||
| I don't know if it's possible. | ||
| What I've said to my audience all the time is, and what I've said to the Trump people and anyone who will listen, is that I will stake out the position to be on the liberal side of the MAGA movement. | ||
| And as long as the people to the further right of that are willing to live in the same country as me, then we're going to be okay and we can win an awful lot of elections and we can fix an awful lot of things. | ||
| Trump has largely fixed the immigration situation and we've fixed the borders. | ||
| The economy is turning around. | ||
| There's a lot of, you know, we're going in with ICE now, which I know a lot of people don't like, but we're fixing some of the problems for the first time in America in a long, long time. | ||
| So that really is the challenge. | ||
| Can the liberals and the people who want limited government and individual rights and understand you're going to be just, you could be fundamentally different than your neighbor, but that all fits within the American promise. | ||
| That actually is what the founders intended. | ||
| Can they fit with the forces of a conservative movement that definitely have impulses not to be part of that? | ||
| That will be the great challenge. | ||
| That is what I'm going to continue to do. | ||
| I think that's probably, in some sense, a little bit of what your political battles are about as well. | ||
| You know, how do you figure out the blend between, if I understand it correctly, you know, your liberal party, which is, again, closer to our conservative party, probably has far more in common right now with parties on the right than parties on the left. | ||
| But if I'm wrong, I don't want to speak too much about your politics, but that's my impression so far. | ||
| And that will be the challenge, really, for all of Western nations. | ||
| Where do the liberals fit? |
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