| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I think cable TV, when you have four, five, six people sitting around that all agree with each other is pretty boring, to be honest. | ||
| I think if you just have people saying the same thing over and over again, there's no conflict, there's no testing of ideas. | ||
| I think it's boring. | ||
| I don't think people learn anything from that. | ||
| And I think it becomes a forum for or a platform for insanity. | ||
| I mean, you referenced the view. | ||
| I mean, listen to what they say out there. | ||
| And they say these things to each other. | ||
| And I mean, I'm sure you play the clips. | ||
| It is objectively crazy what they say. | ||
| And then yet they're all sitting around out there looking at each other going, oh my gosh, you're so smart. | ||
| And then the other one says, no, no, you're so smart. | ||
| Oh, you're so sane. | ||
| No, you're very sane. | ||
| Like you have these people who should be wearing sandwich boards and standing on a street corner telling each other how smart and sane they are. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| All right, I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| And joining me today is a CNN senior political contributor and author of the new book, A Revolution of Common Sense, Scott Jennings. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Honored to be here. | ||
| Really appreciate this invitation. | ||
| And I've been looking forward to it for a long time. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Well, you've already set a record on this show because we probably play clips of you more than anyone else outside of Trump. | ||
| So my audience knows you, yet you've never been a guest on the show. | ||
| So this is an interesting moment here. | ||
| We will see if your wit that you are doing at that table over at CNN at 8 o'clock matches when you are matched up against me. | ||
| Let's just start. | ||
| Let's start with that before we get into all the day's news and all that stuff. | ||
| When you took the gig over at CNN, did you realize it was going to become as viral as it became? | ||
| Because to me, the magic is that you just say the basic stuff that me and everybody else is thinking. | ||
| Usually I don't analyze the clips. | ||
| I'm like, here's Scott Jennings saying something sane. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know it actually. | ||
| I've been there for a long time. | ||
| I started actually in 2017, and it was really a part-time job, very part-time for me in the beginning. | ||
| But it really changed and took off during the 24 campaign. | ||
| We covered the campaign fully. | ||
| You know, in 2020, you know, it was during COVID. | ||
| Nothing was right about the coverage, you know, because we had, you know, there were no conventions, really. | ||
| The debates weren't real. | ||
| In 24, we covered it fully. | ||
| So that was a platform. | ||
| And then we started this debating show in August of the campaign between the conventions. | ||
| And that really gave me a chance to show what we can do when you put, you know, sort of an unscripted debating format, which we had not done. | ||
| You know, CNN had a long history of pioneering cable news debates like CrossFire and other forms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crossfire, yeah. | |
| They had gone away from it. | ||
| And our CEO, Mark Thompson, I think correctly brought it back. | ||
| Interestingly, they originally thought it was just going to be temporary just for the campaign. | ||
| But everybody loved it so much, they've kept it on the air. | ||
| And it's really become one of our best shows. | ||
| And I think it's really one of the best platforms on cable television for a conservative to do what you said, which is basically say something common sense or rational that half or more than half of the country is saying in their day-to-day life. | ||
| So is it weird to be in the building when you're up against so many people that are saying crazy things and you know that laying out the truth is going to go viral. | ||
| I asked the same question to my friend or our friend, Shermicha Singleton. | ||
| I mean, it's basic stuff, but then you have to take the mic off and you have to take the makeup off and all that stuff and be in a building with them after you've just owned them. | ||
| I mean, what's that like? | ||
| You know, I sort of give everybody the benefit of the doubt when it comes to saying what they really think. | ||
| And look, if you want to go on television and espouse some liberal view or say something that is the progressive radical mindset of the day, that's your right to do that. | ||
| And it's my right to push back on that and it's my right to debate you on that. | ||
| And it's also my right to distribute those debates to the American people. | ||
| I mean, if you're worried about it being viral on the internet, you shouldn't have said it on television in the first place, would be my view. | ||
| And so, look, I think the beauty of the debating show is that everybody's ideas get tested. | ||
| Mine get tested. | ||
| I go on with arguments and somebody pushes back against me and I have to defend it too. | ||
| So I guess my advice would be if you're sensitive about it, come with better arguments. | ||
| And it won't, you know, it won't, it won't hurt so badly on the internet. | ||
| But the truth is, most of the time, what they're saying, what the liberal is saying, is what they actually believe. | ||
| It's just when it runs up against a conservative counterpoint, it makes it sound far more unreasonable or sort of ludicrous than when they probably said it out loud in one of their small bubbles. | ||
| Do you think they don't realize that when they're sitting down with you? | ||
| Like, you would think at this point they'd be like, well, I'm going to be sitting across the table from Scott, so I really better think this through. | ||
| And yet they do it time and again and again and again. | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of liberal America doesn't interact with Republicans or conservatives. | ||
| I mean, punditry, regular life, whatever. | ||
| I think for some reason, there's a culture on the left. | ||
| And you've seen this in some polling recently where people on the left are saying, I won't be friends with a Republican. | ||
| I won't work for a Republican. | ||
| I won't work with a Republican. | ||
| I won't date a Republican. | ||
| You see them cloistering themselves off from people who think differently from them. | ||
| So they wind up living in these bubbles. | ||
| Their ideas, their arguments, their political views never run up against a conservative alternative or an alternate point of view. | ||
| And I think they forget, like, you know, other people have different points of views out there. | ||
| And by the way, sometimes some of the things you're saying out loud that's getting head nods from your little social circle, it's pretty nonsensical. | ||
| And it will sound nonsensical when some rational common sense person from Middle America chews it up and spits it out, which is sort of what I try to do. | ||
| What do you make of the asymmetry of all of these panels? | ||
| Not just like the ideological asymmetry, in that it's usually you or Shermichael against like five guys, or even on the view, you know, it's four basic, four or five, you know, pretty hardcore leftists against, what's her name, who I always forget, they give her the cookie, Alyssa Farrow. | ||
| She's perfectly nice, but she's just the outlier there because they have to pretend there's balance. | ||
| I mean, the fact that the balance is never actually balanced. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| You know, I think cable TV, when you have four, five, six people sitting around that all agree with each other is pretty boring, to be honest. | ||
| I think if you just have people saying the same thing over and over again, there's no conflict. | ||
| There's no testing of ideas. | ||
| I think it's boring. | ||
| I don't think people learn anything from that. | ||
| And I think it becomes a forum for or a platform for insanity. | ||
| I mean, you referenced the view. | ||
| I mean, listen to what they say out there. | ||
| And they say these things to each other. | ||
| And I mean, I'm sure you play the clips. | ||
| It is objectively crazy what they say. | ||
| And yet they're all sitting around out there looking at each other, going, oh my gosh, you're so smart. | ||
| And then the other one says, no, no, you're so smart. | ||
| Oh, you're so sane. | ||
| No, you're very sane. | ||
| Like you have these People who should be wearing sandwich boards and standing on a street corner telling each other how smart insane they are. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And so I go all over the country. | ||
| I hear two things. | ||
| I love you and I love the debates. | ||
| I don't agree with you, but I love the debates. | ||
| There is a hunger in this country for debates, smart debates, reasonable debates, good faith debates, people who can listen and react. | ||
| There's a hunger for that out there. | ||
| And I just think the cable panels that have all one side or the other, I mean, what are you really learning from that? | ||
| Not very much. | ||
| So as a guy that just wrote a book on common sense that's on cable news that just made that diagnosis right there, how much blame for the sort of sanity crisis that we have, if that's what you want to call it, lays at the foot of cable news itself that they put us in this position by lying about so much and misreporting on so much and all the rest of it. | ||
| Well, look, I think there are some people out there who, I'm just going to say this broadly about the media industry in general. | ||
| One of the reasons I think people have lost confidence in it is because it became less of a vehicle for giving you the news, the information, the facts, and more of a vehicle for giving you the narrative that exists to grind or an ideological axe. | ||
| And people pick up on that. | ||
| That's why so many people are looking elsewhere for information. | ||
| They're logging on to podcasts. | ||
| They're picking up alternative sources because they didn't think they could trust what they were getting out of media generally. | ||
| I don't want to single out cable news, but certainly it's part of it. | ||
| Look at all the polling. | ||
| Look at the Gallup poll, the trusted institutions stuff that they do. | ||
| People have lost trust in the media. | ||
| It can be regained, but you have to have a commitment to platforming all points of views, and you have to have a commitment to telling you the truth and not just the narrative. | ||
| And I think when people decide that you're giving them a narrative and not necessarily telling them all the facts, they lose confidence in it. | ||
| They go elsewhere. | ||
| And, you know, in this world we live in, as you well know, there's all kinds of places where you can get information right now. | ||
| And all kinds of people, by the way, who are doing really good stuff, journalism stuff, that mainstream news organizations aren't willing to do because it might, I don't know, tear down a liberal sacred cow somewhere, say in Minnesota. | ||
| And so that's another problem the news business has is you've got to be willing to cover everything and you can't pull your punches just because the person that's going to get punched happens to be a Democrat or from the liberal persuasion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So before we get to the Minnesota story, which I do want to discuss and CNN is definitely a piece of that in some of their follow-up to Shirley, do you track what's going on on the online influencer space? | ||
| It seemed to me that for about a decade, something really rich and robust was happening, and a lot of it has devolved into the same kind of misinformation or disinformation or just outright drivel that so much of mainstream was. | ||
| Do you track any of that stuff? | ||
| Because you're like a little bit in both worlds, I would say. | ||
| Yeah, look, I consume a lot of information. | ||
| And look, I personally think X and what Elon Musk has done with X has changed the future of media. | ||
| It has changed the direction of our information distribution. | ||
| It broke the stranglehold, frankly, that mainstream media had on our political information distribution system in this country. | ||
| I said on election night in 2024 that that election was the death of the political information distribution complex. | ||
| Part of that is X. | ||
| We can now go right to the source. | ||
| I mean, I use X all day long because I can see actual videos of people talking to me. | ||
| I don't have to have it filtered, you know, someone telling me something or even like little snippets of it cut up and maybe I'm not getting the full picture. | ||
| I can get everything on X. | ||
| And so I do track a lot of it. | ||
| And look, I don't get into the fights going on between everybody. | ||
| And I, you know, I certainly am in a position where I have to be really sure about what I am seeing and what I am reporting on myself because I don't want to go on TV and say something that turns out to be untrue or not the full story. | ||
| I want to be someone known as presenting the full picture of whatever argument that I'm making. | ||
| And so I do track it, but I'm very careful, you know, and I treat everybody the same. | ||
| I want to know what you're saying. | ||
| I want to see what you're saying. | ||
| I also need to verify what you're saying and whether that's true or whether there's more to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So let's dive into some of the issues of the day that undoubtedly you'll be discussing on CNN this week. | ||
| So, of course, we'll get to the Minnesota thing in a second, but of course, the big thing is the Venezuela situation and Maduro is now sitting in somewhere in New York City in a likely very poorly lit room, not happy. | ||
| This seems all good to me. | ||
| I see no downside to what has happened here. | ||
| What do you make of the whole situation? | ||
| Yeah, I'm largely with you on it. | ||
| And again, Trump, the competence of this is amazing. | ||
| Whether it's been his engagement in the Middle East, you know, we saw the military go into Iran and take out the nuclear weapons and they never even knew we were there. | ||
| We go into Venezuela and we arrest a fugitive from justice in 90 minutes and no American soldiers. | ||
| On a military base with nobody getting injured. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I mean, the competence of this, of Trump, of Rubio, of General Kaine, I mean, all these guys are showing what strong and competent American leadership can do. | ||
| So I think that's great. | ||
| And of course, you juxtapose that against what we saw during Biden. | ||
| The major military operation during Biden was the incompetent, chaotic, and embarrassing pullout from Afghanistan. | ||
| We just don't operate that way under Donald Trump. | ||
| I think the whole Monroe doctrine or Donroad doctrine they're talking about, policing our own hemisphere, that's a good thing because guess what? | ||
| China and Russia were down there mucking around in Venezuela and they weren't on vacation. | ||
| They were down there because of oil and other reasons. | ||
| They'd like to have a presence in the Western hemisphere and these are our enemies. | ||
| We just can't allow it. | ||
| And so I think from a foreign policy perspective, from an economic perspective, the whole war on drugs, which I fully support, it was a narco-terrorist state. | ||
| And Maduro, you know, we don't recognize him as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. | ||
| What we recognize him as is the head of a drug cartel who's been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. | ||
| And so I sort of view this as a pretty elaborate but necessary law enforcement operation. | ||
| They indicted a guy. | ||
| They arrested a guy. | ||
| He's going to go to court. | ||
| I suspect he'll be convicted because the evidence against him and his wife and the rest of that regime is pretty unassailable. | ||
| I'm anxious to see what happens next. | ||
| The vice president down there, the lady who's taking over, is a hardcore socialist. | ||
| And some people say, you know, she's really been one of the main powers behind the cartel down there. | ||
| But Trump gave her a warning. | ||
| You know, don't get out of line or your fate will be worse than Maduro. | ||
| So I'm like everybody else. | ||
| I'm anxious to see how the remaining Venezuelan regime operates at this point. | ||
| So it seems pretty obvious to me that when Trump does anything, you're going to get the obvious kind of leftist reaction to it. | ||
| It doesn't matter what it is. | ||
| They're just going to take the opposite approach. | ||
| Okay, so they're out on the street saying hands off Venezuela. | ||
| The more libertarian part of the right that seems to never want America to do anything, to me, it seems that they can't believe that we are competent again. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| Because I'm very sympathetic to, okay, we don't want to go into all these countries and break them and do all the crap that we've done for 20 years. | ||
| But you just pointed out we were in and out of Iran in 90 minutes, basically. | ||
| This thing took no time whatsoever. | ||
| They can't sort of accept that we're actually good at stuff again. | ||
| I totally agree with that sentiment. | ||
| They came to believe that if the government was doing something, it must be wrong or it must be handled incorrectly. | ||
| But they never counted on when Republicans take over, maybe we are going to handle things correctly. | ||
| When Donald Trump took over, maybe we are going to handle things correctly or learn from our mistakes in the past. | ||
| And goodness knows our government has made mistakes, but it's obvious Trump has learned from what's happened in the past and he operates better and more competently and differently. | ||
| Why can't you give him the benefit of the doubt? | ||
| For the people who sort of doubt all this and try to poo-poo it or do what they're doing, it's almost like they never really supported the idea of Trump in the first place. | ||
| I mean, here's the thing. | ||
| I voted for Trump three times because I thought he'd be a better president and more competent than the alternative. | ||
| Did you not think that? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I mean, that's why I voted for him. | ||
| And I'm largely happy with the results of it, particularly on this stuff. | ||
| It's very competent. | ||
| And so I get the feeling there's some people out there who, A, never really thought Trump was going to be a competent actor. | ||
| They were wrong about that. | ||
| And B, I also think there are people who wanted to ascribe their own isolationist views to Trump. | ||
| And they're mad at him because he won't do it. | ||
| He's not an isolationist. | ||
| He's not an adventurist, but he's for smart engagement. | ||
| Did it make sense to take out the nukes in Iran? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did it make sense to get the living hostages home? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did it make sense to get rid of an illegitimate dictator who was ruining things in our own backyard? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that doesn't mean we're in any forever wars. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people have predicted World War III and all this calamity. | ||
| Literally none of it has happened. | ||
| All the predictions of these people have not come true because I think Trump has been about as smart about it as you can be. | ||
| Is that sort of proving the horseshoe theory of politics to you in real time? | ||
| I mean, you know, Tucker was screaming about World War III during the Iran thing. | ||
| Again, it ended immediately, quicker than it started, basically. | ||
| You know, now you've got people on the left, like Jank Uger from the Young Turks, screaming about this Venezuela thing and sounds exactly like Candace Owens to whatever extent she's on the right. | ||
| Like it's just creating very strange bedfellows. | ||
| Maybe that's what Trump's ultimate power is, that he can just expose all the crazy people. | ||
| Well, and the bed is made of anti-Semitism. | ||
| I mean, let's be honest. | ||
| I mean, when you really listen to all these arguments against all of these things, somewhere in the tweet, somewhere in the statement, it always comes back to, and the Jews. | ||
| I mean, it never fails. | ||
| All the things you just mentioned, somehow, even Venezuela, I've seen people arguing, and the Jews. | ||
| Oh, yeah, both of the two that I just mentioned in their Venezuela tweets. | ||
| It was about Israel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And so look, I get it. | ||
| You hate the Jews. | ||
| You hate Israel. | ||
| I understand, but not everything is connected to that. | ||
| But they want to ascribe everything. | ||
| I mean, frankly, it makes them sound kind of crazy, truthfully. | ||
| Now, it is true. | ||
| Donald Trump's been the most pro-Israel president we've ever had. | ||
| He's revered by the Jewish people in Israel. | ||
| And I think he's done right by our country in strengthening that alliance and also being one of the strongest advocates against anti-Semitism we've ever had in this country. | ||
| And so all those things are correct, by the way. | ||
| I don't know what would be incorrect about standing strong with a Democratic ally and standing against, you know, sort of one of the world's oldest hatreds that tends to be the base of a great many of the conspiracy theories that infect our politics. | ||
| Trump's been great on it, but they all wanted him to fall in line with their point of view. | ||
| He hasn't done it. | ||
| Most Republicans agree with Trump, by the way, and now they're mad about it. | ||
| But it all comes back to one thing. | ||
| The Jews, Israel, the Jews, Israel. | ||
| It's just time and again, that's where they wind up. | ||
| And I don't know, I think it's kind of discrediting when you're trying to argue about Venezuela and you wind up arguing about Israel. | ||
| It pretty much shows where you are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's also just boring. | ||
| I mean, honestly, at the end of the day, it's just boring. | ||
| Like, I'll debate anything all day long. | ||
| But, like, at the end, if you know where it's going always, it's just not that exciting. | ||
| So let's shift from Venezuela. | ||
| Wait, so I guess, well, let's wrap up Venezuela with this. | ||
| I mean, what do you think happens next now? | ||
| So, we've got Maduro. | ||
| Maybe there's some transitional government there. | ||
| I mean, you know, a lot of people was this about the oil and all the rest. | ||
| I mean, what do you think the next couple of months look like? | ||
| You know, I think on the oil piece, TBD, it's a different kind of, it's harder to refine. | ||
| I, you know, it's people arguing this is about oil. | ||
| I mean, Trump has acknowledged that some of this is about oil. | ||
| They did appropriate American property down there, and they have had oil flowing out that was under sanctions. | ||
| So all that is correct. | ||
| What we do with that oil or what happens to it, I'm less sure of, and I'm less sure of what it will do to affect energy markets. | ||
| I do know this. | ||
| I don't want China and Russia and our hemisphere, you know, getting resources out of our hemisphere from an illegitimate communist dictator. | ||
| That's not a good thing. | ||
| And so I'm happy about that. | ||
| On who governs Venezuela and what this transitional government does, hard to say. | ||
| I mean, the people that are left in charge right now are hardcore socialists and I don't think are good people. | ||
| Now, they can see what happens to you when you get out of line. | ||
| And so maybe they'll act right. | ||
| I assume what you would want there is to have a legitimate election. | ||
| And they previously did have a legitimate election in Venezuela that Maduro then stole and used it as an excuse to run the country. | ||
| So if you had a legitimate election there, my suspicion is the people in Venezuela would love to throw off the yoke of these socialist oppressors and get themselves a legitimate government that stands up for the people of Venezuela. | ||
| That, by the way, would then probably be an ally to the United States as opposed to what they have now, which is an ally of China and Russia and Iran, which we don't want in our backyard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just so crazy. | ||
| I think, you know, I'm here in Miami where there's so many Venezuelans and people are so freaking happy. | ||
| It's all over the place, all over the place. | ||
| And then you watch some of these, you know, you watch the Libtards in New York, and then you watch these people on the right screaming. | ||
| It's like, guys, guys, do you ever just Maduro is the only illegal alien that Democrats are trying to import into the United States right now? | ||
| I mean, it's crazy, but like, I don't know. | ||
| I, you know, we went and got a bad person who is a fugitive from American justice who's been indicted in a process by our Justice Department for doing bad things that hurt Americans. | ||
| And they're, I mean, I see these people out in the streets, free Maduro, send Maduro back. | ||
| Like, but of course, they all look very familiar because it's the same people who are fussing about Somalia and then they're fussing about Palestine. | ||
| And I don't know, it seems like it's the cause d'sure. | ||
| If Trump's doing it, I have to be against it. | ||
| So I'll trade in my Palestine-Somalia flag for a Venezuelan flag today, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, whoever's running that, whoever's running that print shop that they're printing all those signs, that's the guy that's cashing in. | ||
| I can assure you, they're not so pleased. | ||
| They're capitalists. | ||
| They're making money. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The money's coming from China, but that guy's a capitalist. | ||
| Well, let's tell you, you mentioned Somalia, so let's talk about Minnesota, obviously. | ||
| As we're recording this this morning, Tim Walz now is not going to seek re-election, which is one of the craziest and fastest free falls in American politics, I think, in history. | ||
| But it all started with this young guy, Nick Shirley, who I've met a few times, who is just a normal guy who got interested in politics and had a phone and started asking questions. | ||
| This is the new version of the reporter, I suppose. | ||
| I mean, look what you can do with a little bit of gumption and a camera and a YouTube channel. | ||
| I mean, when you look at the impact that video had, I mean, the tens of millions, hundreds of millions of views. | ||
| I mean, what he did, his product has seen, has been seen by more people than ever see the nightly news on NBC or ABC or CBS. | ||
| And it brought to the front of our politics a necessary conversation about fraud. | ||
| I mean, it is true the Justice Department had been looking into it there, but it was really being downplayed by the national press. | ||
| It was being downplayed. | ||
| And certainly Tim Walz was looking the other way. | ||
| People were effectively trying to hide it from you. | ||
| They didn't want to talk about it. | ||
| The numbers are staggering. | ||
| $9 billion, maybe. | ||
| And Minnesota is not a big state. | ||
| And it's all happening in one small little community. | ||
| But again, I go back to what we talked about earlier. | ||
| The reason they wanted to downplay it or hide it from you is because it went against the narrative. | ||
| You know, the narrative is that all immigration is good. | ||
| No matter where they come from or what they come here to do, all immigration is good. | ||
| And any sort of reporting that shows that in this case, immigration probably created a massive amount of fraud against American taxpayers in Minnesota, that goes against the narrative. | ||
| And so we got to get rid of it. | ||
| Shirley shows up, shines a bright light on it. | ||
| Now everybody knows about it. | ||
| And, you know, just a few days later, Tim Walz isn't running for re-election. | ||
| I can assure you, if he thought he was clean on this, he'd still be in his reelection campaign today. | ||
| There's a reason he dropped out. | ||
| And that reason is Nick Shirley. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else are you tracking as sort of the big stories of the year? | ||
| Like, what else do you think will be important as we roll into the midterms? | ||
| Well, one thing is, what are the Democrats going to do? | ||
| Where is the energy in their party? | ||
| Where are they headed? | ||
| If you look at Momdani in New York, if you look at the communist mayor of Seattle, if you look at the person they nominated down in that Tennessee special election around Nashville a few weeks ago that Republicans won, you look at who they are nominating for offices. | ||
| A lot of them are from this very outspoken socialist wing of the Democratic Party. | ||
| So when I'm thinking about the midterms, two things I don't know. | ||
| What are the final maps going to look like? | ||
| And we may see the Supreme Court act on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. | ||
| And who are the Democrats going to nominate? | ||
| If they nominate a bunch of socialist lunatics, a bunch of socialist theater kids in districts around the country that are a little more purple or a little more moderate, they may not do as well as they think they are going to do. | ||
| And so that's a big trend here. | ||
| Are the Democrats going to go down this Momdani road? | ||
| Are they going to go down the road of trying to act like normal human beings? | ||
| And I don't know if we know the answer to that yet. | ||
| To me, it's going to define what happens this year. | ||
| We've played a lot of clips of you talking about Momdami, but now that he's sworn in, how bad do you think it's going to get? | ||
| One of my fears around the Mamdani thing has been that you might be able to fake it for a while, meaning that the budgets don't all come in. | ||
| You can kind of fake some of the free stuff for a while. | ||
| It'll look pretty good. | ||
| You know, they'll glaze him for a bit. | ||
| And while they do that, they'll be able to replicate him in some other cities and states. | ||
| It may just all fall apart overnight. | ||
| I mean, there's already some really bad signs with some of the people he's brought in. | ||
| But what do you think is going to happen there? | ||
| What does the timeline look like? | ||
| Look, I think it's already bad. | ||
| I mean, look, he erased all the executive orders and specifically the ones dealing with anti-Semitism. | ||
| So, you know, for all the Democrats who on CNN were trying to explain to me that he's not personally anti-Semitic, well, A, he's surrounded by a bunch of people that are. | ||
| And B, he erased all these executive orders. | ||
| And the two tweets that he decided to delete had specifically to do with anti-Semitism and Israel. | ||
| So you tell me. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, he hired Al-Qaeda's lawyer to be his chief counsel. | ||
| I mean, it sounds crazy, like it's like I'm making it up. | ||
| I'm literally not. | ||
| He hired Al-Qaeda's lawyer to be his lawyer. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Number three, everybody tells me he's all about affordability and he spent the entire weekend tweeting about and talking about Maduro, a fellow socialist. | ||
| He's really mad. | ||
| Maduro got arrested and is now in New York City. | ||
| That has nothing to do with affordability. | ||
| So everything this guy is doing is exactly who we as conservatives thought he was and that we were assured by Democrats and media that, oh, he's really not. | ||
| He's really not that way. | ||
| Look who he appoints. | ||
| He's got this lady running his landlord-tenant stuff who says, Well, white people are going to have to have a different relationship with private property than they've ever had before. | ||
| That relationship will be that you don't have any anymore. | ||
| We now, we're going to take your stuff. | ||
| I mean, this is lunatic, dorm room, radical fringe crap that is now in charge of the financial capital of the world. | ||
| And so, I, you know, I would like to believe that the best case scenario is incompetence, grinds him to a halt. | ||
| Worst case scenario: this is a socialist/slash communist crusader who's going to put people in place that are going to do things that are going to irreparably damage the fabric of New York City. | ||
| And it may be to the benefit of Miami or other places, but for New York City and what it has stood for, I mean, given his moves early on, I'm not optimistic about this guy. | ||
| I assure you, Scott, as a Miamian, we've had more than enough. | ||
| We're closed. | ||
| We're closed, man. | ||
| You also did not mention that there is a first ever openly lesbian fire chief. | ||
| Sure, she's never worked in the fire department before, but she's a lesbian, Scott. | ||
| For God's sakes, I mean, that's pretty great. | ||
| I wonder what these interviews are like. | ||
| Okay, I need to hire a head of the fire department. | ||
| My first question is: What is your sexual orientation? | ||
| Because that is the most important thing I'm hiring for. | ||
| I think only 3% of New York City firefighters are women. | ||
| 25% are African-American or Hispanic men. | ||
| All were passed over for fire chief. | ||
| So, for a person who had never had worked in the fire department. | ||
| Now, she'd been an EMT, and I want to give her her. | ||
| She's an EMT. | ||
| But, you know, if I were a black or Hispanic male firefighter and I got passed over for a white lesbian non-firefighter for fire chief, I might wonder, like, what are my advancement possibilities here? | ||
| Am I going to be discriminated against by Mamdani because he only seems to care about the sexual orientation of people as it relates to putting out fires? | ||
| Again, I know these things sound crazy to the average person. | ||
| That's the way he picked it. | ||
| The number one criteria for picking a fire chief was: do you like to sleep with someone of the same gender? | ||
| That was their number one criteria. | ||
| Listen, I know when we have a small house fire here, a little grease fire in the kitchen, we only will let firefighters in who are lesbian or bi. | ||
| Not gay men are out. | ||
| They don't count anymore. | ||
| You've got to be a lesbian or bisexual. | ||
| I put some of my friends in New York. | ||
| You might want to get an extra fire extinguisher before they all sell out. | ||
| Put it in your apartment. | ||
| What do you make of the other part that's kind of uncomfortable to talk about with this guy, which is his seeming affinity for Islamism? | ||
| Well, look, it's New York City. | ||
| I mean, this is where 9-11 happened. | ||
| And go back to the campaign. | ||
| I think one of the most despicable things he did in the campaign was say that the real problem with 9-11 was that his aunt, who wasn't really his aunt, felt bad about riding the subway. | ||
| That was the real problem with 9-11. | ||
| Nothing else, nothing else about 9-11 caused you any heartburn, you know, Zoran. | ||
| And so I go back to that moment all the time because what he said was so patently ridiculous. | ||
| And look, he won the election and, you know, he's the mayor now, but my goodness, this is New York City. | ||
| I still, I mean, I know a lot of people don't because a lot of folks were born after, but I still remember what it was like in this country on 9-11. | ||
| I was in New York City during 9-11. | ||
| And I, you know, we know who attacked us, and we know that they would do it again if they could. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I think, and I talk about this in my book a lot. | ||
| I think the West is at war with a lot of different people, but some of it is radical Islamic terrorism. | ||
| Europe's been overrun by this mass migration from Islamic populations, and it is warping their domestic politics. | ||
| This could happen in the United States. | ||
| It has happened at a few places. | ||
| Look at Dearborn, Michigan, where you've had, look at Minneapolis, where you've had, I saw the lieutenant governor of Minneapolis the other day, who's not a Muslim, giving a press conference, wearing a full-blown Muslim get up. | ||
| Again, she's not a Muslim, as far as I know. | ||
| I have witnessed for 10 years Democratic activists go to virtually every Republican thing wearing the handmaid's tail outfit. | ||
| And that's what I was told was that Republicans were going to force women to wear these costumes. | ||
| And yet, it's the Democratic lieutenant governor of Minnesota who's actually wearing a costume of a religion that she's not part of. | ||
| Again, look, I think the West is at war with radical Islam. | ||
| And I just, I think if we don't take it seriously, what's happening in Europe could happen here. | ||
| It has to be taken seriously. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| Yeah, I'm totally with you. | ||
| I mean, I'm very, I would say, I'm bullish, obviously, on America. | ||
| And I think certain countries in Central and Eastern Europe, like primarily Hungary and Poland and a few of those countries, I think are going to be fine. | ||
| What do you make of Western Europe? | ||
| Because to me, I think France, the UK, Brussels, maybe even the Netherlands, like, I don't see much of a future. | ||
| I see no way they turn this around. | ||
| Well, they won't turn it around until people who are willing to tell hard truths instead of comfortable lies get power. | ||
| And right now, the people who are in charge in those countries largely are looking the other way on some very, very bad domestic trends. | ||
| You know, how about rape, for instance, you know, in England? | ||
| How about a lot of things that are born out of a culture that's not native to those countries is warping their domestic politics and it is causing them to accept certain outcomes in their cultures that nobody really thinks are good, but they feel like they have to accept it because of these populations that have moved in. | ||
| And so, again, I think what the administration has said about Western Europe, you know, that Europe and its culture are being overrun right now, I think it's largely true. | ||
| Now, you could get it under control, but it would require some leadership that is not feckless. | ||
| And that's largely what you get in Europe right now, feckless leadership. | ||
| Look after when Trump was trying to bring an end to the Israel-Gaza war and bring home the living hostages. | ||
| You had the leaders of these Western European countries all coming out on the threshold of getting that deal done. | ||
| Oh, we want to give the Hamas a state. | ||
| Why were you undercutting the president of the United States and Israel trying to bring home their people by effectively supporting the Hamas position at the critical hour of that? | ||
| It made no sense, except if you look inside those countries, they felt like they had to do it to manage their own domestic politics. | ||
| It was pretty stupid and despicable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| I mean, basically, you're saying that it buys them a little bit of time, but ultimately destroys their country. | ||
| And I guess that's what feckless leaders probably do pretty well. | ||
| Keep me last. | ||
| Never works, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Never works. | ||
| So let's talk. | ||
| We'll wrap up with some common sense stuff because that is what the book is about. | ||
| What do you think is the key thing that we kind of lost in America that led to so much of this craziness? | ||
| Was this just that we weren't teaching the right things in school? | ||
| Was this we weren't teaching the right things at home? | ||
| Is there some other side version of it? | ||
| Look, I think one of our two major political parties was completely and totally hijacked by people who had extraordinarily fringe views on a bunch of different issues. | ||
| And for whatever reason, the Democratic Party decided to go along with it, whether it was on the transgender stuff, whether it was on the climate stuff, whether it's on immigration. | ||
| I mean, you go down the list of issues that are really plaguing the Democratic Party. | ||
| It all goes back to one issue. | ||
| They allowed fringe, radical, socialist progressives who have views that are, I think, very fringe, very minority viewpoints in America, but they allowed that to become the center of the Democratic argument, the center of the Democratic platform. | ||
| And they had to- What does that say to you? | ||
| What does that say to you about liberals? | ||
| I mean, and I mean good, I mean classical liberals, like the founders of our country were classical liberals. | ||
| Obviously, the word liberal is mucked up now, but what does that tell you about liberalism itself that it was so easily manipulated here? | ||
| Well, I think for the classic liberal, the Bill Mars of the world, I think they are wide awake to what has happened to the left, and they're not afraid to speak out about it. | ||
| But I think to the Democratic politicians who describe themselves as liberals, there's really only one who's standing up to them in Washington. | ||
| That's John Fetterman. | ||
| Every other single person from Schumer all the way down has just fallen in line. | ||
| And I think what it tells me is how empty they are, how feckless they are, how they don't really have personal views. | ||
| They just have views that, you know, they're just trying to go along with the mob. | ||
| And, you know, that's no way to run a party. | ||
| It's certainly no way to run a country, in my opinion. | ||
| But look what they're willing to go along with just to hold on to power for another couple of years. | ||
| And look what Democrats during the Clinton year stood for. | ||
| Look what, you know, look at the statements of some of these people who have been around forever, just 8, 10, 15 years ago. | ||
| They were saying totally opposite things to what they have to say today to get along with these radicals in their party that they've allowed to hijack their party. | ||
| And so I look, I think it's going to be, I don't know what's going to happen in the presidential election in 2028, but I think as long as they're willing to die on all these 80-20 hills on the 20s side of these hills, I think they're going to have a hard time regaining power. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| You know, the midterms, I don't think it's going to tell us much about the identity of the Democratic Party. | ||
| I think that 2028 presidential election, if they can't shed some of this fringe radicalism that has come to define them, they have like an 18% approval rating right now among the American people. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason for that because they've taken the 20 on every 80-20 issue in America. | ||
| They can't get rid of that. | ||
| They're going to have a hard time. | ||
| Yeah, I quote you on the 80-20 thing all the time because I think that's just right. | ||
| And I think it's what Trump understands about politics and people better than any of these guys. | ||
| All right, I'm going to ask you about two people to end this thing. | ||
| Let's end really uncomfortably here. | ||
| You sit there with Anna Navarro. | ||
| I can't stand that woman, the hysterics, the over-emoting, the lying, the complaining about Florida while she's married to a guy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| And I know where she lives. | ||
| She's doing okay. | ||
| You want to say something nice about her? | ||
| Oh, look, I've worked with Anna for a number of years. | ||
| We have a lot of sharp disagreements on the air. | ||
| I will note this week, I think for the first time since Donald Trump came to power, she said something nice about Donald Trump as it related to Venezuela. | ||
| She praised him on Venezuela. | ||
| And so that's a step in the baby steps, I guess. | ||
| Baby steps, baby steps. | ||
| I mean, the truth is she supported Biden. | ||
| Biden talked tough on Maduro, but never really said anything about it. | ||
| And now Trump, who she obviously opposed, did something about it. | ||
| So, you know, this week, Ana Navarro and I are aligned. | ||
| Trump did right on Venezuela, so we'll take it as a win. | ||
| We'll call it a win. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that week is going to wrap up very quickly. | ||
| And then I'll just ask you about one more because so it is Abby's show. | ||
| And I am constantly, I can never figure out what she truly thinks about anything. | ||
| I think she's, I know this is not fun for me to ask you, but I just think she's just doing this constant shell game where she's obviously a Democrat. | ||
| Like that's, she's not really hiding that, but just never really telling people what she thinks in a not very honest way. | ||
| Am I not giving her enough credit here? | ||
| I'm really trying to be nice in the new year, you know? | ||
| Well, all I'll say about Abby is it's her show. | ||
| She's our leader, and she is like our point guard. | ||
| You know, she's moving the ball around, and we're all out there playing offense and playing defense on the court with Abby. | ||
| So, I've gotten to know her very well over the last couple of years. | ||
| And, you know, we have a great relationship. | ||
| We've obviously had some sharp exchanges on the air, and she does have a point of view. | ||
| And I think as the show has gone on, she's been more willing to pretty openly show you where she is on a particular issue or what her views are. | ||
| And hey, that's perfectly fine. | ||
| And it's perfectly fine for us to disagree. | ||
| And occasionally, we have been in agreement on an issue, but not very often. | ||
| But look, I think what she's doing is not easy. | ||
| Trying to manage those personalities at the table is somewhat difficult. | ||
| And there is a lot of chaos out there sometimes. | ||
| But I'll tell you this: I think it's the most unique show on television. | ||
| It's really the only true debating show on television. | ||
| And to be thrown into that without really much of a background in it, I'm sure it was a little scary for her, but she's handled it. | ||
| And I've been really grateful to be part of it. | ||
| And I look forward to seeing her every week. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Spoken like a true television personality. | ||
| Well, Scott, I thank you because you make my job very, very easy every day. | ||
| If I don't feel like doing any heavy lifting, we just throw to a Scott Jennings clip. | ||
| And I wish you luck next time you're at that table. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| It was an honor to be here. | ||
| And thanks for talking about the book and playing the clips. | ||
| And we'll keep watching. | ||
| And hopefully, I'll see you down in Florida sometime soon. | ||
| We are free. | ||
| We are here. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. |