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Jan. 21, 2026 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
21:59
How Best Intentions Are Destroying Our Children & The Future | Robby Starbuck
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Crazy Stories About Smashing Pumpkins 00:05:05
So that means I graduated high school just before I turned 16.
I had already done one year of college at that point because this program, it believed in excellence.
If you were willing to put in the work, you were able to excel and jump ahead.
That program today was deemed racist by the state of California.
And so the state of California essentially said there's too many white kids, too many Asian kids in it, so it's not fair.
And that accelerated path does not exist in the same way today that it did back then.
And I think that what I'd be hearing from teachers is that everything stacked against me, right?
Your mom was a refugee, Latina, you know, so you're a Latino and Latinos just are going to have a harder time achieving things because this country is racist, so on and so forth.
You know, I mean, you know the drill.
Everybody knows what a young kid would be getting told these days.
And, you know, you can pretend you're doing that out of some sort of good-hearted, you know, empathetic vision of the world where you're trying to uplift people and right wrongs of the past.
But the truth is, it's just disempowering.
All you're doing is giving people excuses.
And I think that that's an incredibly dangerous thing.
All right, I'm Dave Rubin.
And joining me today is the host of the Robbie Starbuck show and the director of The War on Children, Robbie Starbuck.
I cannot believe that we have never done this before.
I thought you've been on the show before, but apparently not.
Hello.
Yeah, you know what's funny too is I've actually had somebody come up to me before and say, hey, I saw you on Dave Rubin's show because I've never been on a show.
I didn't want to embarrass them, so I didn't say anything.
So I am kind of wondering, maybe you had like a doppelganger on at some point.
There could be some alternate reality where we've done this before.
I've definitely shown clips of you throughout the year and I've mentioned you.
And I think maybe when you sat down with Jordan Peterson, we've shown some stuff.
But for people that don't know you, I'd like you to give a brief bio.
But when I was doing a little research on you this morning, you have directed a bunch of music videos over the years, including the Smashing Pumpkins.
And I got to tell you, 1994, 1995, Dave Rubin smoking pot in Binghamton University, New York.
Lot of smashing pumpkins, my friend.
So I must be a fan of your previous work.
Yes.
So actually, I have a crazy story about that.
I've never told anybody.
So Billy, dude, Zebra.
Okay.
Billy Corgan, I have to say, you know, and I am very, very unlikely to compliment celebrities I've directed, okay?
Cause most of them have an IQ that could only be described as extremely challenging to deal with, but Billy is not one of them.
Okay.
So Billy's hilarious.
He knows so much about so many different things.
One of my birthdays, and I can't remember what birthday it was, but Billy actually, we were shooting something together and he serenaded me with all of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins songs on a piano, just him and the piano, me and three other people in the room.
And that was pretty cool because growing up, you know, as a high schooler, I listened to Smashing Pumpkins all the time.
So it was one of those moments where you're like, okay, life has done some very cool things here.
But yeah, Billy's one of those guys where like, if you get into a conversation with him, you could talk to him for hours because it just like trails off into a million different cool things.
Yeah.
Well, you've just outed your age because I've obviously got a couple of years on you.
If you were in high school at the time and I was in college, what was that album?
What was that huge album?
It was like the album of the year around 94, 95.
What was their big album?
I think it was, I forget if the title was 1979, was it?
Was it Melan?
Oh, yeah, well, 1979 or Melancholy, I guess.
Yeah, maybe it was 1979.
I always am terrible at names.
In fact, one of my kids asked me about a video that I directed like probably two years ago.
I didn't direct it two years ago, but they asked me this two years ago.
And they were like, what was that song?
And I was like, I have no idea.
I don't remember.
All right.
Instead of doing a recap of 90s music, let's dive into some of the stuff that you're known for.
So you're really a sort of force in the anti-woke, anti-DEI world.
But I think a lot of it has to do with your family background.
So maybe you could start there quickly and then we can get into some of the things that you've been up to.
Yeah.
Well, my mom and my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all came here from Cuba.
And so, you know, if anybody's ever watched Destiny L, which I don't recommend to anybody because it's awful, but there's one character on it that's pretty funny, Marcelo.
And Marcelo's Cuban and he tells a story about his mom that is like so accurate to my life.
And he's like, okay, so the problem with being the child of a Cuban refugee who escaped communism is you are never allowed to have a bad day, period.
It is not allowed.
You come home from school and your mom's like, hey, how was your day at school?
You know, and you're like, oh, it was, it was all right.
And she's like, oh, oh, it's all right.
It's all right.
Really?
What happened?
Did somebody take your freedom today?
And it's like, okay, so you already start out with this base level positivity that you have to have, right?
Rafael's Legacy 00:15:48
That's like, okay, I'm extremely lucky.
But then on top of that, you know, I am not sure I've ever met anybody who loved our country more than my great-grandfather.
His name's Rafael.
We called him Peyo.
And, you know, he's passed now.
But the incredible way he lived his life was a testament to me about who I wanted to be, right?
He was like my father figure.
And for him, he worked his whole life.
You know, he was essentially a cowboy, you know, had land in Cuba and everything and was a hard worker his whole life, but had built up a really nice life for himself.
He ends up having everything taken by the Cuban government, comes here to America, never complains about starting over, started over as a janitor working double shifts, worked until he was like 90 years old, and never a complaint, like literally not one complaint.
All he had was gratitude because he realized that had this happened in America, there was nowhere to run to.
At least he had somewhere to run to.
And, you know, that's the truth is that gratitude just runs through my veins.
And so when I see this modern, you know, sort of woke DEI movement and I see how it tries to disempower people, especially young minorities too.
I mean, the discrimination against young white men is insane.
But there's this other piece of it too, where it disempowers young minorities too.
Because like I look at my own example, when I was in school, I was constantly having reasserted to me that I could do anything in this country, right?
That anything was possible.
This was a land of opportunity.
You have no excuses to not succeed at whatever it is you want to succeed in in life.
Well, I try to put myself in the classroom chair of a kid today, you know, and say, what would I be getting told in that same position now?
And there's sort of an interesting anecdote, which is that I was in a special program as a kid that existed for students who had accelerated learning, right?
So that means I graduated high school just before I turned 16.
I had already done one year of college at that point because this program, it believed in excellence.
If you were willing to put in the work, you were able to excel and jump ahead.
That program today was deemed racist by the state of California.
And so the state of California essentially said there's too many white kids, too many Asian kids in it, so it's not fair.
And that accelerated path does not exist in the same way today that it did back then.
And I think that what I'd be hearing from teachers is that everything stacked against me, right?
Your mom was a refugee, Latina, you know, so you're a Latino and Latinos just are going to have a harder time achieving things because this country is racist, so on and so forth.
You know, I mean, you know the drill.
Everybody knows what a young kid would be getting told these days.
And, you know, you can pretend you're doing that out of some sort of good-hearted, you know, empathetic vision of the world where you're trying to uplift people and right wrongs of the past.
But the truth is, it's just disempowering.
All you're doing is giving people excuses.
And I think that that's an incredibly dangerous thing.
So when I look at my own kids, I've got four of them.
You know, I don't want them to live in that world.
I want them to live in one that believes in merit, that says if you work the hardest, you put in the time, you excel at something, you're going to be rewarded for it.
You know, I don't want to live in a world where the people who do the best are constantly punished.
And so that is really my motivation for all of this is ensuring that, you know, if I had to boil it down, the United States does not become Cuba 2.0 because we could go down that path.
I mean, I think we were actually very close to tipping into it, which is why I started speaking out about politics.
You know, we talked about it in the opening.
I directed some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, Oscar winning actors, actresses, some of the biggest music stars.
And so to give that career up that a lot of people would kill for, especially since I didn't have a Hollywood family.
I didn't have a rich family.
I built everything myself.
I only did that because I saw that we could very easily become Cuba 2.0.
And I felt like Hollywood in general had become a net negative to culture for our kids and for the future of our country.
And I could either be a part of that and profit off of it and keep my own kids safe or try to do the right thing, which is what I promised my family I would do.
I think you know I'm here in Miami, which is basically little Cuba.
I mean, we've got our own little Cuba and Cayocho and all that.
But, you know, the stories that I hear and the affinity that I have to the Cuban community is incredible because everyone basically tells that story that you told right there about freedom.
And it's just, you know, I've heard some people say that the younger generation now, even of Cubans, has been infected with some of this stuff, which is just so absolutely crazy.
But let's talk about Hollywood for a minute because I know you've been very critical of what's happened to that town.
As we're taping this, it's just a couple of days after the Golden Globes.
I don't care about any of these award shows.
I don't even think I saw any of the shows that were on.
I'm watching Fallout on Prime.
That's pretty much okay.
That's basically all I'm watching these days.
But I thought there was an interesting moment.
I don't know if you saw it, but maybe you can speak to the kind of tone around it, where Wanda Sykes was on stage and she made fun of Bill Maher, basically being like, you're just like a little too much for us.
And I thought it was kind of interesting.
It's like, here you have the most moderate liberal who still, despite having broken bread with Trump, wouldn't call himself a Trump supporter.
He's still defending liberalism.
And he's too extreme for these guys.
And you could feel it in the room.
And I wonder if that probably, I'm going to guess I know the answer, if that jives with what your general take on Hollywood is, that there's just, you just have to give everything to them.
Otherwise, you're out.
Yeah, I mean, let's reframe that even.
Bill Maher, I wouldn't describe as a moderate, actually.
Like his actual positions are not super moderate.
He's pretty left-wing.
And it is only because the Democratic Party has gone so extremely left that he could be possibly viewed through any lens as a moderate.
Because his views, like if you go back 10 years ago, you would describe him as a typical left-wing Democrat that is pretty far left of center.
Today, though, it looks almost moderate in comparison to what the party has adopted, which is essentially a socialist/slash, you know, new form of communist ideology.
And so the way I explain this to people is the old communism of our grandparents believed in seizing the means of production.
And the new communism, I think, recognizes that optically you can't win any political races doing that if you outright say we want to seize the means of production.
I mean, unless it's, I guess, the mayor of New York, you know, but outside of New York City, I don't think that that's very viable.
And I think the Democrats understand that.
So instead, what they adopted over the last decade, which is actually quite smart if you think about it, is that you seize the minds of the people in charge of production.
So that's why at the board level in corporate America, you see so many Democrats stacking boards.
This was a very focused project by the left.
They did this throughout every institution, corporate America, entertainment.
But what I would say about people like Wanda Sykes is keep it up because what they've done essentially, I don't know if you've ever seen the graphic where it shows like, you know, politics in the 90s and how everything was like much closer.
And then 2000.
You know, little by little, what was far right before is now extremely moderate, right?
And like what was extremely far left then is like, you know, you're essentially a fascist now in the eyes of Democrats because you're just too conservative.
Keep it up because you are pushing people over to our side.
I will say one of my regrets is that, you know, I was up for a lot of awards and won a lot of awards as a director.
And I was invited to all the big award shows and stuff.
And I actually never went, even when I won big, major video music awards and stuff like that.
Like I didn't go to the VMAs.
I didn't go to any of those things.
I never accepted any of the awards in person.
And I kind of wish I had now, just so I would have spoken up and said something different.
But the reason that I didn't go was precisely because I thought that it was really condescending to the rest of the country to have a bunch of elitists go up there on stage and tell them how to live their lives.
And secondarily, you're doing that, moralizing to people while most of you are on drugs, cheating on your partners, and engaging in all kinds of hedonistic shit on the outside, right?
So like I'm aware of what is going on in those rooms.
How could I possibly sit there and not absolutely blow my lid over watching these people try to moralize to the rest of the country?
You know, Adam Carollo, who lives in LA still, I think he's on his way out, but he's been saying something that I've really come around to, which is that a huge percentage of the Hollywood people don't even believe it, but they know how replaceable they are.
Meaning, no matter how good you think Tom Hanks was in Forrest Gump or anyone in any movie, they are simply replaceable.
They did not, you know what I mean?
It's like maybe it won't be someone as good as Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, but like you could replace him.
So they all bend the knee to it because they're just interchangeable parts.
To me, that makes a lot of sense on why they behave the way they do.
You have to look at the psychology of celebrities.
And I'm not going to say all of them are like this, but I think the good ones out there would actually 100% agree with what I'm about to say.
Psychologically, you're talking about a group of narcissists who know very little about anything having to do with politics.
And when I say know very little, I am being charitable.
These are some of the stupidest people you will ever come across.
Listen, I took six months of an acting class in 2002.
I get it.
So you've met people in these classes, right?
I mean, there's a reason they have to, you know, I won't say all of them, but a good number of them why they enjoy pretending to be somebody else, because if they were actually, you know, being themselves, it's quite a sad experience.
Most of them have severe psychological problems and deficits, right?
They don't ever know who they can trust.
If you really get to the A or B or C list level, you always feel like somebody is trying to get something from you, right?
So you don't have anybody you can trust.
You don't know who your real friends are.
You exist for the dopamine hits, right?
So anything that poses a threat to the next dopamine hit, a feeling important and celebrated is a threat to your very existence, not just a threat to your bank account, your success, but to your existence, because your existence is wrapped up in yourself and your own idea of your importance.
Not any sort of moral structure, hierarchy, or belief system.
Your belief system is self.
It is about self-importance.
And so when that's the case, the most trusted person for that celebrity becomes their PR people.
And their PR people are not stupid people.
They do know a lot about politics.
They just happen to be very wrong about the politics they have and they're radicals.
So those people tend to feed to the celebrities what they need to say.
It's how you end up with a vast number of celebrities, you know, supporting Hamas essentially, right?
Like that is not a position they take because they agree categorically with Hamas's behavior, actions, or religion.
They don't.
It's because they had somebody tell them this is the position you need to take or else you're going to be framed like this and this is what's going to happen.
So that's the real system at play here, right?
And the internet has only exacerbated this because now people expect you to have a take about everything if you're a celebrity.
And so all you're getting now is, you know, where you used to have maybe one really bad take from a celebrity a year.
Now, from that one celebrity, you're getting like bad picks, right?
So it's never been more naked and exposed how stupid these people really are.
And there are exceptions, but the vast majority are absolutely what I would refer to as intellectually disadvantaged.
Right.
And you still had, even at the Golden Globes, you had this, you know, Hannah Einbinder, ridiculous person with the, you know, basically a Hamas supporter.
And it's like not one of them will say a word about Iran.
It's just, it's just patently absurd.
What do you make of the general state of woke at the moment?
You know, I had Piers Morgan in here a couple of months ago and he wrote a book called Woke is Dead.
And I pushed back on him and said, you know, I think there was probably a moment where we all thought it was dead after the Trump election, but it seems to have recalibrated right in front of our eyes, kind of transformed in front of our eyes and now burst forth into its kind of what we're getting out of New York, the woke Islamist, bizarro red-green alliance collection.
So I don't think it is dead.
What do you think?
You know, I warned after Trump won that people would rush to say wokeness is dead, right?
And the truth is these sorts of ideas don't die.
They hibernate and they sort of reassess the landscape and they rebuild and then they deploy again.
And so what's important is that you build structures and systems that are able to essentially clamp down on that the minute that it re-emerges.
And that's why I've said, you know, with what we're seeing right now, you know, I think the ICE scenario is actually a very important one, right?
Because you're seeing sort of the re-emergence of what I would call the BLM army, but in support of these radicals who are trying to harass or in some cases, attack ICE officers.
And so I think it's very important that the Trump administration handles this in a manner that leaves absolutely no confusion about where we are and where we're going.
And that means you need to rapidly deploy massive numbers of people out there from ICE, from other agencies to support ICE.
And you need to put these groups down, arrest them and put them in prison for a very long time if they have impeded investigations or behaved like this.
I think they've been lenient to a degree.
And I think that the time for leniency is over.
I think you have to very directly take this on because what, you know, society is all built on incentives, right?
And if the incentives tell you that it is okay and you're going to get social media points and dopamine hits and viral videos for going and disrupting ICE, then more and more leftists are going to do not only that, adjacent to that.
But if the social structure is telling you that what is going to happen to you if you do that is you're going to spend a very long time in prison, people start, you know, reassessing whether or not they should do stupid things.
It's kind of like the phrase that'll start to reverberate in their heads is do stupid things, win stupid prizes.
And I think that's what we need to get through the heads of these far left activists is that your time has passed and you've re-emerged at a point where it is unsafe to do so.
And we're not going to allow this behavior in this country.
We have new incentives, new lines, and these are going to be what you can expect going forward.
And I think that's very important if we want a society worth a damn.
So I'm completely with you on that.
And I think you give them an inch, they're going to take a mile, all of that stuff.
Do you think that the Trump administration has the balls to do it?
Meaning the messaging is on point for what you just said right there.
Trump's saying it, Kier Sinom is saying it.
Many others, Stephen Miller, et cetera, they're saying that all the time.
Do you think they will have the balls if this continues for another week or two, let's say out of Minneapolis or it starts spreading to some other cities?
We saw what happened in Los Angeles the last couple of days, that they will actually start doing mass arrests and make sure that those cities actually keep those people in jail as opposed to what happens in New York and LA where they, you know, they slap you on the butt and just send you off.
I certainly hope they ramp up in the way that I'm talking about.
If I had a piece of advice for the Trump administration at risk of giving Marco Rubio another job, that's not my suggestion.
Yeah, that guy does not want another job.
He's got 18 outfits now.
When I say this, everybody's going to jump to Marco, but there's other Latinos, I promise.
I think that President Trump needs to have a Latino run that effort very publicly and be sort of the public spokesman of the Trump administration because this is one of the few times you'll ever see me argue in favor of choosing somebody specifically because of their background.
But it is precisely because I know what is going to happen through the media, and you need to have a Latino in that position to say, look, if the primary left-wing argument here is that this is somehow racist, you're going to need to explain that to our CBP, to our ICE officials, who are vast majority, by the way, Latino, and to myself, who's leading this operation, also Latino.
Why They Clean Toilets 00:00:45
You're going to need to explain that to us because our families are Latino.
We're doing this because we love our country and we enforce the laws of our country.
And actually, I think kind of the racist thing is they assume all illegal immigrants are Latino.
That seems to be the overarching theory, is that they're all people who clean your toilets, at least if you watch the video.
And so I think that would be a smart thing for them to do.
We've only got a minute left.
Anything else you want to hit on real quick?
And then we will definitely do this again in that I thought you had already been on the show.
Yeah, I would just tell people: you know, if you're interested in the fight to ensure that kids are safe and that kids live in a society that has clear lines and that we're uplifting our kids to the right place, check out our film, The War on Children.
The War on Our Kids 00:00:48
You can find it at thewaronchildren.com or on Amazon Prime.
It essentially goes through the entire left-wing plan to carry out this war on our kids, to de-genderize them, to change language, to change the education systems, do everything they can to stunt the growth of the next generation and sort of indoctrinate them into the far left trenches so that they can fight for their army.
Robbie, I've enjoyed finally having you on, and I assure you we will do it again.
Link to the film is down below.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks, Dave.
If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here.
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