Sept. 22, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:29
3425 The Failure of Mainstream Media | Dave Rubin and Stefan Molyneux
In the aftermath of another riot following a police shooting death, the mainstream media's bias is again fully visible. Dave Rubin joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the rise of the alternative media, the chaotic Charlotte riots, the thirst for political power, the difference between religion and government, contrasting cultural narratives, third party political candidates, the rise of Donald Trump and if the Republican Presidential candidate can be trusted or believed. Dave Rubin is a comedian, TV personality and the host of The Rubin Report, a talk show about big ideas and free speech. Website: http://www.rubinreport.comYouTube: http://www.youtube.com/rubinreportTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/rubinreportLike baboons, our elected leaders are literally addicted to powerhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/9228257/Like-baboons-our-elected-leaders-are-literally-addicted-to-power.htmlFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So here we have, I guess, the confluence of two people that some people have wanted to get together for quite some time.
I assume that meant in a romantic sense, but it turns out we're just going to explore things on video.
This is Dave Rubin.
I'm sure that you know him, but if you don't, he is a comedian.
TV personality.
Boy, there's a phrase that sounds like an antonym.
And the host of The Rubin Report, which is a great talk show about big ideas, free speech.
He has the most interesting guests.
I have to say that because we're talking together, so I guess I could be considered a guest.
You can find Dave's excellent work at rubinreport.com and youtube.com slash rubinreport.
Thanks, Dave.
It's great to finally connect.
It's great to be with you.
Wait, are you saying this is not a romantic interlude?
Because that's what my producer said.
We're going to be talking about free speech and stuff?
Well, as a philosopher, that's foreplay for me.
It's like cheap wine.
It's like, I guess, your favorite band, Journey, playing in the background.
It's a whole bunch of great things.
We'll have a couple of hearts float across the screen as we continue to talk.
So we're, I guess, two people in what is known, colloquially and somewhat dismissively, as the alternative media.
You know how the instance like truth is an alternative to lying.
It's just alternative lying is called truth.
And it's been such a huge growth.
I actually first joined YouTube.
I was like, I don't know, maybe user four or something like that over 10 years ago.
And the growth has been absolutely astonishing, particularly over the last couple of years.
As society begins to fragment more and more, I think people are looking for more criticism, more questions, more methodology of thinking, more rationality, more evidence, more dialogue.
And I think that has really driven people's demand and hunger for viewpoints that are credible, that are trustworthy, that are rational, that are nuanced, that are balanced, God help us.
Do you find that your show's growth has been driven by some of those factors?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, look, I don't think, and I say this often on my show, I don't think that what I'm doing is rocket science.
I'm telling the truth to the best of my ability.
I listen when people speak.
We're so used to We're so used to jumping down everybody's throats, so used to attacking everybody, and not only attacking them personally, but always trying to find something in them that if you can find that wrong with them, it's like the house of cards around them all falls down.
And just, you know, attacking people's motives and their person and all of this stuff.
Then you couple that with the media that in general, if we look at just the big three cable news ones here in the States, I mean, that is pretty partisan, pretty awful.
The one that we all want to be good, CNN, in some ways is the worst.
Because they said, alright, we're not going to be on the right like Fox.
We're not going to be on the left like MSNBC. We're going to be in the middle.
And what that means is Wolf Blitzer sitting between a Trump surrogate and a Hillary surrogate.
And that's not news.
That's just dribble.
That's just spin that you're just coordinating with the campaigns.
So for people like us and for the new generation of people that are out there on YouTube and that are podcasting and live streaming and using technology to get our minds and our ideas out there...
We were desperately needed, but guess what?
And I'm going to guess this might stand for you too.
If there had been a zillion people before me doing this and doing it effectively, I'd be doing something else.
You know what I mean?
And one day, if all the stuff that I do, if 20 interviewers come in that are better than me and do better work than I do, then you know what?
Great.
I'll still find something else to do.
I love what I'm doing, and it's rewarding.
When you have people that say to you, wow, you're saying what I'm thinking.
All I'm doing is saying the things that I'm thinking and talking about the things, the trends that I see in this country and in this world that are bad trends that we have to start fighting back on.
And unfortunately, no one in the mainstream media is doing it.
So you know what?
Here we are.
Yeah.
And I think when you get an oversupply of lies, you get a demand for truth.
It just raises the demand.
And I think that the alternative media, as it's called, Bringing reason and evidence to public discourse is really a response to what has become increasingly perceived, and I think quite accurately so, as relentless manipulation on the part of the mainstream media.
They're not interested in bringing the facts.
They're not interested in bringing evidence.
They're interested in baiting.
They're interested in manipulating.
They're interested in skewing the facts in order to pursue a particular agenda, which generally seems to be sort of pro-democrat and so on.
And I think people didn't have as much of a chance to see how manipulative it was until the alternative media came along, the internet came along.
And now things have become so rapid that when a media falsehood is being constructed in real-time it is also being deconstructed in real-time on the Internet You can see it in websites that are doing board postings.
You can see it in people immediately doing periscopes like Mike Cernovich does and other people do.
You can see the very next day when people get together and talk about things, this is what they said, here are the facts.
And this idea that this massive golem or Franken monster of manipulated information is being deconstructed in real time, I don't know if the mainstream media knows just how many people are following in the wake and disassembling what they're building because they just keep doing it.
They just keep doing it because they have grown so fat, literally and figuratively.
They have grown so fat on being on the dole.
Look, the White House Correspondents Dinner, what is that?
You have all of the politicians in Washington, including the President of the United States, at a dinner...
Which they call the Nerd Prom, because they're so nerdy, it's cool to be a nerd, I guess.
They call it the Nerd Prom, and what do they do?
They sit there and roast each other, but they're in on it together.
Half of the people that are in mainstream media are married to people that are in politics, or they worked for people in politics, or they worked on campaigns that they're now commenting on.
You know, to your point, though, about the time frame, this is the interesting thing, I think.
This time frame between the bullshit and then when it can be exposed.
And Cernovich is all over this, obviously.
I don't know if you saw just a couple days ago, CNN ran a headline that said Trump is for racial profiling.
He was talking about how they profile in Israel to try and find people who might want to do the Israelis harm.
Yeah, and then they inserted a word.
Just inserted a word.
He did not say racial profiling.
And what the Israelis do, and I've been there a few times, and I've been profiled.
I am a Jew born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island.
They asked me when my bar mitzvah was.
I honestly couldn't even really remember.
And then that was weird.
They thought that was weird.
But literally, I have been profiled while going there because they know that people want to blow up their planes.
What they do is behavioral profiling, and that's what Trump was talking about.
And that puts me in a funny position, because I definitely don't like Clinton, and I don't really like Trump, and I wish there was a more classical liberal or really good libertarian, which Gary Johnson is not, and we can talk about that too.
But it puts me in a position where what I do care about is an honest media, beyond the partisan stuff.
So I then tweeted that out.
And then I get people angry at me.
Oh, you see, you're going to end up, you're going to vote...
The Hillary people get angry at me.
They say, you're going to vote in Trump because you're calling...
And it's like, if we don't have an honest media...
At least, a basically honest media.
And if you let the media, especially when we have so much racial tension, look what's going on in Charlotte right now.
We have so much racial tension being stoked by the media, by the way, happening in this country, if we let that type of thing pass, oh, Trump's for racial profiling, when that's literally not what he said.
He was describing their behavioral or smart profiling, I think is a better way to describe it.
And if we don't call that out, Now it just continues and it will get bigger and bigger and bigger and the job for us For the few of us that are trying to fight this monster, we'll just keep getting more difficult.
I'm afraid you've hit a tripwire in me, Dave.
I can't hold it back.
This is like the genie coming into Aladdin out of the lamp.
So this is like Robin Williams bursting out of the lamp.
Because this really, really angers me to a huge degree.
Because the shootings, the guy who was shot in Charlotte, this guy Scott...
So a few days earlier, there were these bombings in New York.
Hillary Clinton referred to them as bombings, and then Donald Trump referred to a bomb.
And the media said how incredibly irresponsible it was for you, Donald Trump, to refer to something as a bomb without confirmation, without official confirmation, without the facts, without the data, without the evidence coming in.
It's totally irresponsible.
Except no riots occurred because of what Donald Trump said, and he was actually correct.
Then, a couple of days later, there's a tragedy.
A black guy gets shot by a black cop who's under a black police chief.
White people are to blame.
Let's not even start on how that makes sense.
And then the media starts responding with, well, there are a few people who said he was reading a book.
There are a few people who said he was disabled.
He was just sitting in his car, and he was tasered and shot for no reason.
Now, how is that...
Not about a billion times more irresponsible, if we even want to call it irresponsible, for Donald Trump referring to something that blows up as a bomb, which caused no riots, no deaths, no photographers being dragged out and thrown into bonfires, no people throwing rocks off overpasses onto the highway.
The media uses this, oh, you don't have all the facts yet, it's irresponsible to speculate, and then they repeat this hearsay that he was shot, he was reading a book, and so on.
Now the cops say, and there are pictures out there, they say, well, we didn't find a book, but we did find a gun.
So the media responding before the facts are in are stoking these incredibly destructive riots.
The major losses, of course, accrue to the people in those neighborhoods who want peace, quiet, and a decent place for business.
And the media say, oh, Donald Trump's so irresponsible for calling it a bomb.
Well, how about stop feeding this narrative and wait till the facts come in and stop doing all of this stuff that is literally getting people killed?
There we go.
I'm back in the bottle.
Well, you gave a lot there.
Well, first off, A, it was a bomb.
We know that, right?
So it was a bomb.
Now, Trump may have slightly jumped the gun in saying it was a bomb, but we all knew it was a bomb, and Hillary ultimately said it was a bomb.
So that's number one.
Number two, as far as everything that's happening in Charlotte right now, You know, part of the problem here, and this is where I think a lot of the online people go a little more conspiracy than I would because I'm a big, you know, my favorite line really when it comes to this stuff is Carl Sagan, which is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
So I don't think in every case it's that the media is jamming a narrative down our throats as much as they want clicks and they want views as fast as possible.
So that's why they'll say, you know, on CNN all the time, we don't want to speculate, and then they speculate.
And they always want to be the first one to break the news and all that.
So what that causes is sloppy journalism, which then leads to all the innuendo you're talking about, the sloppy facts, the unclear video edits, all of that.
So yes, there is absolutely some degree.
Does the media as a general group want Hillary to win and will go out of their way to demonize Trump at every turn?
Of course, there's no question.
At the same time, some of it isn't purely politically motivated.
And I think it's important to under...
I think there's some...
Listen, there's a distinction there, but that's not excusing it in any way.
I'm not excusing it, but what I'm saying is, at the same time, they just want clicks, they want views.
Look, you know, you want clicks.
I'm not accusing you of doing any of those things.
I want clicks, too.
I treat my channel in a way...
You can look at the way we title things and tag things.
We don't do clickbait.
We don't do any of that stuff.
If I wanted to triple my views, I know what we could do.
You know, and years ago, when we first started, we learned from people that taught us how to do all that stuff.
We don't.
But so part of it, there's a political motivation, and then there's just sort of, you know, an attention motivation.
And combined, that's a toxic mix.
Okay, so your defense is that they want to make money off blood in the streets by stimulating these rumors and raids.
Like, I don't know that that's a very strong defense for their motives or their execution.
No, no, I'm not defending it.
I'm just saying that there's two pieces here, that it's not purely political motivation, that it's also financial.
I'm not saying it's even better and it's not a defense.
I'm just saying that there's a confluence of things here, I think, that lead to sloppy journalism.
And also, you've got to keep in mind that most of the people, especially the cable news people and the mainstream media people, they've been in it for so long with all of these people.
They don't know how to guard them anymore.
As I said before, you know, they're going to the same parties as these people.
And guess what?
If you go to a party with the president and then next time you see him, he just remembers your name or even nods at you, whatever...
It is going to change how you are.
I'm an interviewer.
I know what that's like.
You know what I mean?
I treat everyone with the equal respect, whether they're on the far left or far right or in between.
But once you're kind of in it with these people, and I'm not in it with these people, and you're not in it with these people, you want to stay in it.
That's a human reaction, and that's a big part of the problem of why the Fourth Estate has now just been swallowed by the monster here.
Yeah, I mean, it's always struck me, Dave, that the purpose of independent thoughts, of a commitment to principles, reason and evidence, whatever you want to call it, that the great danger is the mob.
You know, the mob that just gets riled up by sophistry and by false narratives and, you know, the granting.
I think you've referred to it, or maybe other people have, as the...
Victim Olympics or something like that.
The Oppression Olympics.
The drama of being oppressed and having a clearly defined good and evil battle on your hands and so on.
But the mob, of course, is exceedingly dangerous.
It is all body, all fists, very little head.
And it's always struck me that the purpose of being an independent thinker is to have the courage to sort of stand in front of the mob.
You plant your feet, hopefully down to the very center of the earth, and you just got to yell, stop!
Stop.
Slow down.
Put down the pitchforks.
Slow down.
We don't want to act in haste, repent, and leisure.
And it seems to me that the media is sort of back there driving people forward, loosening the balls of the basest instincts of human nature, driving these people forward.
And then it seems to me like the alternative media is kind of standing in front and saying, whoa, Nelly, let's slow down a little.
Let's wait for the facts.
Let's do the civilized thing and wait for information before we go off not even half-cocked.
Well, to prove your point, I mean, did you see just last night the CNN reporter that got basically cold cocked right on air?
So he gets crushed by this guy.
It was obviously intentional.
And then he gets up and basically makes an excuse for why the guy did it.
And it's like...
This is absurd.
This is absurd.
Let's pretend that without even getting into the specifics of this Charlotte shooting, right?
Let's pretend the cops were 100% at fault, just for a little thought exercise here.
There was absolutely no justification.
No gun.
The guy did exactly what he was told to do, and they executed him.
Just for the purposes of this, let's do that.
Well, does anything that those people did last night of destroying those stores and looting, and I don't know if you saw the video that I just saw this morning, basically a mob of people just beating the shit out of a random white person in a garage...
Does any of that?
You know, I had a guy on my show a couple weeks ago by the name Tim Pool, who's a journalist, and he was covering the Milwaukee riots.
He's half Asian, half white.
And he said that he's been to Tahrir Square in Egypt, he's been to Venezuela, all kinds of places with real violence and revolutions.
He said that was the scariest place he had ever been, and he left.
I mean, really think about that.
He said they were hunting down white people.
That's what he said.
If you're watching, I'm not putting words in the guy's mouth.
So the problem is that for all of these people, that even if the incident that sparked this is purely just That doesn't grant you license to disregard every other law that we have on the books.
You can't just randomly start attacking people and throwing rocks over bridges.
And then I saw a video of a family this morning.
Family, two young kids and a mother.
Their car got, you know, the windshield smashed.
It's like...
We have to have some, this goes to what you're saying about, at some point you have to plant your feet and just say, enough.
And we have to live within certain limits.
And within those limits are some civility.
Otherwise, there's just nothing left.
Otherwise, it will be true anarchy out there.
And I know that there are a certain amount of people that that's what their goal is.
Well, I mean, philosophically speaking, there are principles that tidy this up very quickly.
If unjust victimization is wrong, then don't unjustly victimize others, right?
So as your point, even if this guy turns out, you know, he was a white guy, some racist, and whatever it was, some motivation, it's not the case.
But if it was, then the response would be, well, the unjust victimization of Scott was a terrible, terrible thing.
And it would have been.
But you cannot rationally or morally respond to an unjust victimization by going out and unjustly victimizing others.
And this collectivist concept, the racism that is there, is people protesting against racism by saying, you know, and this is a sort of a cliche, and I know it's not the majority of black people, but you know, the white people are devils, white people are racist, white people are oppressors, and so on.
Well, there's a collectivist negative statement about an entire race.
And, you know, in fighting racism, you know, there's a...
There's a great quote from Nietzsche where he says, be careful fighting monsters that you do not become a monster yourself.
And it seems that this kind of bounce back or blowback seems to be escalating to the point where I think that some of the black activists are in danger of losing credibility with society as a whole, which is a bit of a tragedy because they have some good things to say.
But if it gets overshadowed by all of this aggression and racism and dysfunction, you know, I'm sorry, I can't hear what you're saying over what you're doing.
Of course, look, on my show every week now, I say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't dismiss the intentions of the people that feel that something unjust is happening to them and their community.
But when you cross that line, look, imagine if last night, instead of what happened, mass riots and violence and attacking innocent people, imagine instead of that, there had been a mass rally of 10,000 people marching to City Hall and protesting.
All of the good people in this country, not the true racist fringes, but the good people of this country would look at that and say, you know, there's something wrong here and there's a community that's hurt and they're playing by the rules and we have to be aware of this.
But instead...
People watch what happened last night and they don't get sympathy for what's out there.
They actually create anti-sympathy.
And then at the same time, because our education is so bad, people are so misguided in who they're angry at.
So I was watching CNN last night and they had somebody, a random guy out there, screaming about Trump.
Screaming about Trump.
Now again, as I say on my show all the time, this, what I'm about to say, is not defensive Trump.
But Donald Trump has nothing to do with this.
He's not in government.
He's not the governor and he's not the mayor and he's not the president or anything.
Hillary Clinton has been in this administration, so if you're going to lay blame at one of them, you'd have to lay more on her.
I don't think what happened to Charlotte has anything to do with her, but the point is you have people that are so misguided.
They're angry, and they don't know which way to project their anger, so then you have someone that's rioting on the street screaming about Trump, and it's like Trump had not only nothing to do with this, he wasn't even in the ballpark of what you're talking about.
And that's the kind of misguided thing that then I know that the Trump people go, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is exactly the problem.
That we're being blamed for things that have nothing to do with us.
Trump had no power in this situation and he's being blamed.
So that's a, for me as a liberal, it's an interesting spot that I find myself in these days because I'm not a far left progressive, regressive liberal where I see the bad motivation in everybody.
And I'm still not, I'm not someone that's on the right, really.
I'm more of a classical liberal libertarian.
I'm trying to look at these things through open eyes and using logic and reason and the things that you mentioned before.
And unfortunately, that's not very rewarded in this country right now.
But I think we can get there if we keep pushing.
I really do.
Well, and you talked about education, and I think that is one of the great things that is crippling not just America, but the West as a whole, maybe around the world, but I know a little bit more about the West.
You know, in the 1960s, it became basically illegal to fire teachers, and you got this slow barnacle-like accumulation of just bad teaching, bad methodologies, mean teachers, you know, some good teachers in the mix as well.
But, you know, whenever you can't fire people, you know, if you've got a comedian who can't be fired, he's not going to work very hard on his jokes, right?
It's like, you know, I've got to be here anyway.
And I think that this decay of critical thinking has been absolutely disastrous.
And it's one of these really slow, insidious disasters that takes a generation or two to show up.
But then when it does show up, man, you have painted yourself into a real corner.
People have not been taught basic critical thinking.
You know, the trivium, reason, what used to be called an examination of sophistry, basic philosophical concepts that really aren't that hard to get across to kids and...
The failure of the subjugation of emotion to reason and evidence.
You know, emotion is a very important part of life, but it should not be the dominant way that people approach things.
Because as a society, we have to make decisions.
We have to get things done.
And if we don't have a way of reasoning with each other, inevitably there's going to be escalations.
And they start with the emotional abuse that's pouring out of various extremist elements within society.
You know, the ad hominems, the racist, sexist, misogynist, homo, whatever it is, right?
It starts that way, and then they sort of attack sources of income and escalate in that way.
And eventually, if that doesn't work, and it eventually runs out of working because people stop taking those criticisms seriously, which is a shame because there is racism and needs to be dealt with.
And if it's used all the time, boy, who cries wolf?
Eventually, it's going to escalate to fists.
Eventually, it's going to escalate to Molotov cocktails.
This is what happens when you take reason, evidence, patience, listening, and dialogue out of the conversation in society.
Things still got to get done, and if they can't get done nicely, they will get done not nicely.
Yeah, all right.
You hit a lot there, so let me see how much of it I can bring with me here.
Okay, so first off, this is exactly why I've been so critical of the left as a liberal.
Because, as I said, I came from...
I've always considered myself a liberal.
I remember in 1988, when Michael Dukakis was running for president, I was in seventh grade or eighth grade, and we were having a mock...
And I wanted Dukakis to win, and I remember one day he came out and he said, I'm not a liberal, because George H.W. Bush kept saying you're a liberal as if it's a bad thing.
And I remember thinking, how messed up is the world that this guy who seemed sort of benignly decent was so afraid of the word liberal?
I thought that was very bizarre.
We can get to that in a second.
But this is why I've been critical of the left, because they've gone out of their way for so long To demonize decent people that they disagree with as racist and bigot and homophobe and transphobe and all this stuff.
That they've lost all meaning.
These words have lost all meaning and now they just keep screaming them louder and louder.
So for example...
Eight years ago, when Barack Obama ran for president the first time, he was not for gay marriage.
So there are people that are not for gay marriage now, they're considered homophobes.
Was Barack Obama a homophobe eight years ago?
I don't think so.
But the point is, what the left is doing, what the progressives are doing, and this is why it's regressive, not progressive, is that if you don't change the second they change, If the new thing comes around, and if the second they decide they're okay with trans people, which by the way, I have trans friends and I'm completely okay with trans people, and for many years, hundreds of years, trans people have been using the bathroom and there wasn't a real problem with it.
So I lay blame for the trans thing on both doorsteps, by the way.
But the point is that what they're doing and what's regressive about it is that if you don't change your opinion on something, the second they do, the second they announce, I'm gay married.
Okay, so I'm pretty sure I have a gay card here.
That doesn't mean that everyone right now, if there's a Christian conservative somewhere in Kansas right now that doesn't believe in gay marriage, that they believe in the Bible and marriage between one man and one woman, they are allowed to have their private belief.
I have no problem with that.
I would not force them to bake a cake.
I would go to another baker, okay?
So I'm a better libertarian, by the way, than Gary Johnson in that regard.
But the point is, I would let them have their private belief, and I would, if they started trying to legislate on that, legislate their religious beliefs into public life, then I would fight them in the public square on that.
But by the left screaming so much of this stuff, taking moderate people, basically moderate, you know, a John McCain Or Romney, who seems so moderate right now, if you see the way the things are matching up.
And by screaming racist and misogyny, they said, Romney hates women, he's got a binder of women, and blah blah blah.
It's like, now you created Trump.
And this is something where I completely disagree.
Bill Maher, who I love, who's been a hero of mine for many years, who I hope to get on the show and I want to get on his show.
He did a piece about a month or so ago where he said that the rise of Trump has nothing to do with the left.
This is what the right has been creating for a long time.
And I completely disagree.
If the left refuses to have honest conversations about immigration, about Islamism, about all of these things that we're talking about, Then the natural reaction for rational people will be to move to the right.
And by the way, that would work the other way as well.
If the right goes bonkers on certain things, then people are going to slowly move to the left.
So this isn't even a condemnation of one side more than the other, as much as someone that's a liberal, I'm trying to clean up my camp, and it's a mess, and I'm like the last liberal standing, I think.
Right.
Well, of course, as a gay man, you are to the left, as Milo is to the right.
He's attempting to bring a bit more rational discourse and challenging topics to a pretty entrenched ideology.
Even by talking to Milo, I get hate.
I went to UCLA with Milo, okay?
It was, in effect, it was a Trump rally because, you know, it's all his people are there and there's a lot of MAGA hats and all that stuff.
I got to tell you, so first off, they had...
The protesters created a wall to stop people going in.
So they're not against walls, they just don't like Trump's wall.
And they're throwing garbage cans and they're spitting on people and they're screaming and all that stuff.
And by the way, you know, you can protest.
You're supposed to protest in America.
Use your voice to protest.
But if you block people from entering a building or if you're using violence or other means to stop them from expressing your free speech, well, guess what?
Then they're going to do the same to you.
But I've got to tell you, one thing that really struck me when I did that thing with Milo is that we're at UCLA. You've got to be pretty smart to get into UCLA. We talked to kids from, it was an incredibly diverse audience there, probably 300 or so people, probably another 300 that couldn't get in.
There were gay people, black people, white people, Asian people, everybody, abled people and disabled.
I mean, everybody was there, right?
And I can't tell you how many liberals came up to me.
Liberals.
That said, you know, I don't agree with anything Donald Trump says, but I am so sick of the language policing and the thought policing that I have to support him.
And that's when I realized that there's something else going on here that I've been trying to address on my show and say to the left, we got to wake up if we're going to have some moral authority here.
And I think, as I said, it's working at a micro level now because people are waking up, but I don't think it's going to work for the purposes of this election.
Yeah.
Well, and I think to appeal to your sort of classical liberal roots, Dave, I think one of the great problems that has happened, and I'd say particularly since the 1960s, has been this continual spread of government into what used to be called society.
Right, so when it comes to if you want to have transgendered bathrooms, okay, well then put in transgendered bathrooms.
Or don't.
It's your business.
But now the government has to legislate.
If you want to bake a cake for someone or you don't want to bake a cake for someone, fine.
But now having legislation and laws and force and all this kind of stuff.
Marriage, of course, used to be a private thing.
The government wasn't involved.
Marriage licenses were actually introduced by the Democrats to present blacks and whites from getting married in the past.
So now the government is involved.
And so what's happened is...
There's this terrible thing that, of course, well, plus and minus over hundreds of years, but way back in the day, you know, there was, of course, Catholicism was basically Christendom.
And then Martin Luther came along in the 16th century, translated the Bible into the vernacular.
It was the first time it had been done.
And so rather than being bored by priests droning away in Latin and Greek, people could actually read the Bible for themselves.
And I think that the printing press and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular Gave people direct experience of the text.
And then Christianity splintered, right?
Fragmented into, you know, Calvinists, Wingalians, Anabaptists, Lutherans, you name it, right?
And the Catholics as well.
And because the Catholicism was so wound into the power of the state, every...
Every sect, every group of religious differences, wanted to gain power of the state because the state would be able to impose its view of religion on everyone.
And so you either gained power of the state and used it to impose your view of religion on everyone, or you were persecuted by those who had gained the power of the state.
And so, you know, grabbing the only gun in the room became the focus and resulted in hundreds of years of religious wars throughout Europe.
What does this have to do with what we're talking?
Wait, here comes the big flyby.
I tie it all together.
Alright, here we go.
So now, we have a giant tentacled state which has its hands in everything.
Everything you do is regulated.
A third of Americans require a license from the government just to do their damn jobs.
The government is legislating everything, is controlling everything, and therefore, when people want to get things done, What they want to do is gain control of the state rather than have a dialogue.
If the state is not controlling something and you want to get your way, then you have to make a case for it.
Maybe you can make that case entertainingly.
Maybe you can make a television show that makes your case in an entertaining or engaging or dramatic fashion.
But you have to go out into the marketplace of ideas You have to rely on the quality of your rhetoric and your evidence and your arguments in order to sway people's opinions.
But when the state controls social discourse and social outcomes, people don't have to reason.
They don't have to use evidence.
They have to be bullies, scare people away so that they can take over the power of the state and impose their will on others.
Social discourse of the narrative was relatively centralized, i.e.
before the internet.
You could have, you know, the mainstream media back in the day before the internet was the equivalent of Catholicism before the printing press and the locally translated into the vernacular Bible.
But now everyone can get a hold of the facts themselves, which is causing this giant splintering.
And hopefully at some point down the road, you know, the solution to each religious group trying to take over the state and control every other religious group and the religious wars that killed millions and millions of people, the solution to that was the separation of church and state.
So now you can have your religion, other people can have their religion, but nobody can use the power of the state, theoretically, to impose their religious view on others.
We need a separation of state and society so we have room to have debates without everyone trying to grab the giant guns of the state and train it on everyone else.
Well, the interesting thing about that is that everyone seems to think that you're not allowed to have a private thought anymore.
You're allowed to believe, if you believe, and I don't care what you believe, if you were privately racist...
Or privately anti-Semitic or privately whatever, as long as you're not trying to put laws into place that are going to harm other people, that as long as the laws that we live by treat every individual individually, which is how our constitution is set up, it's how our government is supposed to work, Then you are allowed to think whatever horrible shit you want.
It doesn't mean I like it or care.
For example, I'm an atheist, which all that means to me is that I don't believe in something that I can't prove.
But I don't care.
If you believe in the flying spaghetti monster or in Mohammed or in any other thing, if that gives you some comfort in the privacy of your own home, and you're not legislating it and trying to stop me from living my life, then do whatever the hell you want.
To your point, though, just this week on my show, I had a constitutional law professor from Georgetown University, Randy Barnett, brilliant guy, and I think your audience would really dig the conversation.
And he made a good point about what you're talking about, the expanding government, that I had never really thought before.
He said that one of the reasons that the left wants this expanded government is because it really is about control, but when you extrapolate that, That's precisely why they always want to take away states' rights too, because eventually they want to get it to the point where,
okay, now the federal government's big, we start taking away states' rights, then we start taking away local rights, and then ultimately your only recourse, if you're not happy with your local government that's now controlled by the state government, that's controlled by the federal government, your only recourse will be to leave the country.
And they know that most people really won't leave the country, because even if things are very...
Messed up in America.
And yes, we're not perfect, but it's a pretty great place to live.
And most people still want to come here to live.
So I thought he framed it in a really interesting way, like a real, he called it footnote.
You know, right now you can, if you don't like the estate tax in New York, and you're getting old, and you think you're going to be hit with the estate tax, you can move to Florida, where they don't have an estate tax or something like that.
But ultimately, the more federal control you give You're going to have less ability to vote by foot, to actually move to a place that has more of your values.
And I think that goes to exactly what you're saying, and it's one of the reasons that I would always want to be governed more directly by the people that live in my community, my mayor in my little part of LA here, than bureaucrats in DC. Well, and I'm an atheist as well.
And of course, I was pretty harsh in my younger and hairier days on Christianity.
And fortunately or unfortunately, relentless positivity and niceness from Christians has swayed my view a little bit insofar as what is the great challenge?
If I have a neighbor...
Who is religious, then he practices his religion and it doesn't impose anything in particular upon me.
But if I have a neighbor who is an activist, I want the government to impose stuff, I want to raise taxes, I want to do this, I want to start wars, I want to have an empire, I love imperialism, whatever it's going to be.
Well, then it's no longer a private belief because that person is agitating to have, you know, the awesome power of the state trained upon me to force me to comply to his preferences.
Religion, when there's a separation of church and state, remains a dialogue.
It remains a place where people can have recent debates and so on.
But when statism is people's default position, I want something done, I'm going to damn well get the state to do it.
Then you're in a different situation, because then it's not a live and let live, it's a win-lose, my way or the highway, my way or going to jail, and that to me is where the real challenge is at the moment, which is why I'm much more friendly towards religious people these days, and much more concerned with the people whose first knee-jerk response is to pull out the big giant weapon called the state and make everyone get in line.
Yeah, what an interesting position they've put you in.
I fully hear your logic right there.
I absolutely hear your logic.
And think of the position that you've been put in by big government people.
You now are, in a way, defending people who believe in something that they can't prove, but you feel the moral need to defend those principles, which I think is a fully legitimate and really interesting spot.
And to that point, think about this.
Who did the left hate?
They hated the Christian right, right?
That was the group they hated the most, you know, even more than the Tea Party, although they very much lined the Tea Party up with the Christian right.
They hated the Christian right because of the gays and everything else and blah blah blah.
Donald Trump, in effect, has destroyed the Christian right.
The Christian right, if Trump becomes president, do you think this man is being morally guided by the Christian right?
Of course not.
By the way, I don't think he would be morally guided by white nationalists either.
I think at the end of the day, he ultimately is doing this for himself, and I think he's using all of these groups, and this is what politicians do.
He's using all of these groups to get there.
But in effect, in a certain way, the left should love Trump.
He's completely anti-war.
He's not a neocon.
He doesn't want a nation build, right?
There is no chance we're going to have an adventurous war to build democracy elsewhere, which the Republicans were about for a long time.
And then at the same time, If you're a lefty, Trump doesn't care about gay marriage.
He could not care less about gay marriage.
I guarantee you that if Trump became president, the weed, if you care about marijuana, I live in LA, I have a marijuana license, right?
Which, by the way, is illegal federally, but it's legal here.
So they can still come in and close my dispensary.
And there are people that get medication for cancer and AIDS and Parkinson's and God knows what.
It's like a sanctuary city for pot smokers, right?
Yeah, which is a good kind of sanctuary city.
But the point is that he would, I think, ultimately, if he was president and was presented with this issue about marijuana, he would figure out a way that he would go, well, is it good or bad?
Economically.
And I think ultimately, it's been proven that it's good economically.
Look what's happening in Colorado right now.
And he would be for it.
So in a way, he slayed the Christian right.
He slayed the gay marriage.
All this stuff, he systematically slayed the neocons and all that.
So the left should love him in a certain way.
And then I also understand why they don't, because a lot of the language stuff and all that stuff.
But we find ourselves in just such a bananas place right now, politically.
Yeah, okay.
There's a lot there, too.
I think that the leftist likes Trump because he's cutting off the source of their voting blocks, right?
So if he builds a wall and if there's self-deportations or deportations of illegal immigrants, well, those illegal immigrants will become legal immigrants.
They overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, right?
So he's just cutting down their voting base.
And if he blocks certain Muslim immigration, Muslims overwhelmingly vote for the left.
So...
It's just politics.
It's not anything to do with any moral thing.
I mean, if you can imagine that if people who came over from the border overwhelmingly voted Republican rather than Democrat, how would the Democrat—would they be fighting to keep them all in the country to make sure that they get more votes for the Republican?
Of course not.
They don't care about the people.
They care about the power.
Is that what you're saying?
It's just about power?
We keep thinking it's about morals.
No, it's about power.
Listen, they've done studies— You know, I've always got maximum credibility when I start off with, they've done studies!
It's just mysterious people, but we can link to them below.
So they're done studies.
This is on, I think, bonobos or apes or whatever.
And as you climb up the hierarchy, your brain releases more endorphins, right?
And they're very addictive, right?
That's why you do comedy.
You get the joy juice of getting the crowd going.
It's why I do shows.
It's great fun to...
Get people stimulated into thinking, even if it feels like electroshock therapy for some people sometimes.
As you climb up the hierarchy, you get more endorphins.
And then if you fall down the hierarchy of power in a tribe, you get starved of endorphins and it's really uncomfortable because nature wants to...
Give you an incentive to climb the political hierarchy because that gives you more resources.
It gives you access to more fertile women.
It gives you access to more resources for your kids.
It's good for you genetically and biologically.
And so people who are, you know, that old song, the power junkies, right?
There's a sort of phrase from some song.
They are junkies for political power.
It is a physical addiction and they've measured it.
It's actually stronger than an addiction to cocaine.
Now, if somebody is out there trying to get cocaine, we know that their goal is the high and whatever they're doing is just to get that high or at least to avoid the crash of withdrawal.
And so I think that the majority of people in politics are simply addicted to power.
And of course they'll use moral language because that's a great way to cover up that addiction.
And addicts don't care about the long term.
They care about what happens now.
They care about getting their hit now.
If it costs them their house, their marriage, their kids, it doesn't matter.
They've got to get their hit now.
And I think that's kind of the craziness that's going on, that there's so much power in the government these days and so many power junkies trying to get their hit that I'm not expecting a lot of rational discourse for the next little while.
Well, that's the irony of the whole situation.
Look, I'm a basic believer that the government has to keep you safe.
I think we should have a strong military so that we don't have to use it.
I think the government has to give us roads and education.
I think you can make an interesting moral case for healthcare, but we don't have to go down that road.
But I think the government has some set specific things that it's supposed to do.
But if you were to run on those things, if you were to really run on those things, so even you take a guy like Rand Paul, who I really liked, And I think made sense, and it was so sad that I don't even think he made it through the Iowa straw poll.
I mean, he was out before he was even in.
But even a guy like him, he really wasn't for gay marriage.
And it's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You're a libertarian.
You tell me you're a libertarian.
Your dad is the hero of the libertarian movement.
And you're not really for gay marriage.
You're not really for weed.
And again, I don't want to make these things about gay marriage and weed because they seem so trivial in the scheme of what the thing is.
But that's why we really do need a libertarian party that makes sense, I think.
Because the things that you're talking about, we know the Democrats aren't going to give them to us and the Republicans aren't going to give them to us.
We need a third viable party.
And that's why about two months ago I did a video that I said, look, I'm going to support Gary Johnson at least to try to get him to that magical 15% thing.
Get him in one debate.
I said, look, the guy's not a particularly good libertarian.
He's not a good speaker.
He doesn't have command of the issues.
Trump will outwit him, and Hillary will out-policy him.
I get all that, but let's have one debate with some other ideas.
Now, clearly my mission failed, and I think Gary since then has done some really lame things.
I mean, this is not a great candidate by any stretch.
But the things that you're talking about basically are libertarian values of scaling back some of the power of government And unfortunately, the entire system is built on not doing that.
So how do you unfurl that?
I don't know what the answer is to that.
And I think that's the next movement.
Look, there's people like us out there now that are talking about these ideas.
And even if you want a little more government, for my friends on the left that I understand why they want more, even if for some of them, I mean a little more, I don't mean big government, I mean for a little more than maybe you want, right?
Even for some of them that you would ultimately say, okay, I don't agree with you In theory, but like maybe there's some place we can come to common ground here.
Even for them, it's like we have to start getting that conversation happening because otherwise we got Trump and Clinton now.
Guess what?
Where do you think we're going to be in 2020?
It's going to be much worse for the ideas that you're talking about.
Well, I mean, and that's an interesting question.
And who knows how things are going to play out.
Trump is an unprecedented political force.
Not just unprecedented in America, but I think virtually unprecedented around the world.
that somebody that rich, that charismatic, that well-known, that talented, that effective a communicator, self-funding his own campaign, largely immune from the kind of, you know, put the NASCAR decals on your congressman that you've bought kind of lobbying pressures.
He is a complete wild card.
And I don't know that makes him sound chaotic and so on, but he is someone who would be without precedent.
And I've argued against political action in the past, you know, I guess forgetting Plato's doctrine that lack of involvement in politics ends up with you being ruled by inferior people.
But there is something that is very new and very unknown.
And what Trump is doing, which I think is his essential power, is he is channeling the intense anxiety and fear and anger that are in significant portions of the American population.
The middle class is diminishing enormously.
It used to be like 64% of America, and now it's down below 50%.
And, you know, we've seen in Weimar Republic in the 1930s in Germany, when you carve out the middle class, you get wild swings from either side.
So let me ask you something about Trump, because I think this is the piece that I just...
Still can't grasp.
As someone that cares about logic and reason and the things that you described before, do you...
Forget the...
I get he's an effective communicator.
I get he's giving the people what they want.
I get all of that stuff.
Do you fundamentally believe anything that he says?
That to me is my issue with him.
And by the way, I don't believe anything Hillary says either.
So this is not a defense of Hillary in any stretch or anyone that's involved.
My issue with Trump is that I think he's a showman and a gamer playing the game in a new way.
And I think that in and of itself, Scott Adams, who was on my show, I think you bet on, really laid that out really, really nicely.
My issue is just at the intellectual level, I don't know that I believe anything he says, and I really have a problem with that.
And I'm curious, because you believe in logic and reason and all that stuff.
Do you?
Well, let me ask you this, and I'm not trying to dodge the question, I will answer it.
But Dave, what would be your standard for believing what he says?
How would you know whether you could believe or not believe what he says?
What's your burden of proof here?
My burden of proof is that I'm pretty sure that you could name any topic right now, and I can give you two answers at least that he said on anything.
So, pretty much anything, including the wall.
I don't think he's going to build a wall, even if he becomes president.
I really don't.
I could be wrong.
I could be wrong.
I don't know.
But I think you could throw out any topic to me, be it Iraq war or abortion or anything else, and we can find him saying both things on it.
And by the way, that's not, again, that's not...
The same would be true for you, right?
I mean, the guy is what, 68 or 69 years old or 70?
70, I think he's 70.
I think he's 70, yeah.
So over the course of a public life of many decades, of course you're going to change your opinions.
People can look back.
I've only been in public life for 10 years.
They can look back and find things that I've said that I've changed my mind on.
So...
I would be much more alarmed if he'd been consistent for the past 40 years.
You know, that to me would be, oh my God, what a terrible thing that would be.
I mean, that means that he's no longer, he's not able to process new information or new arguments or new facts or new evidence or anything like that.
So the fact that he may have said different things in the past doesn't trouble me at all.
I think the basic reality for me with regards to Trump's credibility is why is he doing what he's doing?
He had a pretty great life, big successful television show, he's got grandkids, he's got a lovely wife, a I mean, anybody who's got gold belt buckles on their private plane can't be said to be doing too badly at all.
And why would he want to throw himself into this incredible series of giant liberal catapults to the nuts that he's been going through?
Why would he pick such unpopular positions as deportation, illegal immigration, control of Muslim immigrants?
Why would he want to stand up there in a bulletproof vest For everyone else in politics, this is the next step.
You try to become president if you get to the top.
That's the next thing.
It's like that old thing.
Why did I go to Mars?
It's the next thing.
And so why is he up there in a bulletproof vest being called a racist, a rapist, a fraud?
Why is he doing that?
He had a pretty great life, and it certainly wasn't the next step.
I think that he is motivated by wanting to make America better.
He's old enough to remember what America was like before the welfare state or before the massive amounts of debt that are going on, before the decay in government education.
And I think he is really committed to trying to make things better.
Now, people may agree or disagree with his policy proposals and so on.
But, you know, I'm happy to take this bet.
He is going to build that wall.
He is going to build that wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it.
And he is going to really work hard to simplify the income tax, which has become this Byzantium, Kafkaesque, snare all your political opponents in godforsaken labyrinths of legalese and bureaucratese.
So I think he's going to try and simplify the tax code.
I think that he is going to negotiate better trade deals.
And, of course, there's nobody better qualified to do that than him because he's been doing international business for many, many years.
I think he's going to want to try and help out minority communities and poor communities by trying to implement a voucher program, let them choose the educators for their children, and I think these are going to have big effects.
Maybe he is just a very, very good actor, but it doesn't sort of gel together with the life he could have had, the life he's having with all of the attacks and his commitment to particular positions.
I think he's going to follow through.
So that, I think, the sort of undercurrent of what your answer is, I think is interesting, because I've brought that up a couple times.
The idea that this guy has, by every estimation, has every physical thing that someone could want, right?
His taste is horrifically gaudy.
Can we at least agree on that?
Wait, wait, hang on.
Are you saying that he's too kitschy for your gay sensibilities?
Is that where you're coming from?
Listen, there's kitsch, and there's over-the-top, and then there's, like, you know, now we're in, like, Wizard of Oz.
Like, some of that shit in his house is absurd.
You mean he makes Liberace look, like, conservative?
Okay, got it, got it.
No, he makes himself look like Liberace, which...
Whatever.
But taste aside, look, the truth is, and I think that's what the heart of your point is, that he has made a good life for himself by any estimation of what we can look at.
The idea that his family, you know, the only reason anyone knows who Donald Trump Jr.
is and Eric Trump is because their dad helped them become successes and all that stuff, and they have a lot of money and they have real estate and golf courses and all that stuff.
So when I hear people say, well, you know, he's going to start World War III or he's going to It's like, that just doesn't stand to reason based on I'm sorry, Hillary's the one who's saying she's going to go to war with Russia if she even thinks they might be doing cyber attacks and wanted to go to war with Iran.
I mean, as far as World War III goes, this is a woman who paraded around and was responsible significantly for the entire destabilization of the Middle East and all of the deaths that that is.
So the idea that the guy who runs a reality show is the dangerous person when we actually have the track record of the last Secretary of State before one.
Anyway, that's another time.
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I get your point.
You know, look, as a liberal, it's hard for me to fully wrap myself around all that.
But I think you have a nice way of making sort of logical points on a lot of this stuff.
And I think we just have, as a general rule, I just wish our debate was a little more like what we've done here.
For an hour than what we're going to get on Monday when we watch that debate.
Because guess what?
It ain't going to be nearly as...
For whatever extra neurons we had firing during this thing, guess what?
They can take that night off.
Well, we'll see.
You know, maybe we can do a show after the debate and share our thoughts on it because I'm certainly looking forward to it.
It has a sort of Roman spectacle feel to it that I think is fairly new, and I think that there are enough substantive differences between the candidates that it might actually be interesting.
Mostly, it's just about people making paper airplanes of, like, Hallmark card stupid sentimentalities and throwing across the aisle, but...
Listen, I know we've got a hard stop.
You've got somewhere else to get to next, but I just wanted to say, great conversation.
Thanks, brother, for the time.
Really enjoyable.
I hope we can do it again.
Just wanted to remind my listeners, of course, RubenReport.com, R-U-B-I-N, and YouTube.com slash RubenReport to get Dave's excellent videos.
Thanks a lot for your time.
It was a great, great pleasure.
Yeah, it was my pleasure and absolutely happy to come back.
When are you doing my show?
We started making it happen, and then you're a busy guy, apparently.
I am a busy guy and a full-time dad, so it is a challenge, but we'll work it out.
Well, now I've issued the challenge, and you know the commenters, they're not going to let it stop.
Good, good.
Let's see what the market demand is for us rubbing foreheads together in person, because I think that would be fun.
