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What Charlie Kirk's death means for America, with Dave Rubin
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Charlie Kirk's assassination has sparked a global conversation. We have been forced to grapple with issues of free speech, political violence, the changing faces of the right and the left, faith, and the future of western civilisation itself.
Will discussed all of these pressing topics with the host of The Rubin Report, Dave Rubin. Following his sold-out run alongside tour with Jordan Peterson, Dave will be returning to Australia this October for three exclusive, can’t-miss shows in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.
Tickets are available here.
- Melbourne – October 18
- Sydney – October 21
- Brisbane – October 27
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Read The Spectator Australia here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Context of the Assassination
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will. I'm Will Kingston. It's been just over two weeks since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Charlie's death and its aftermath have ignited debates about political violence, free speech, the changing faces of the left and the right, faith And I would suggest nothing short of the future of Western civilization itself.
00:00:45
Speaker
There's no one I would rather discuss those very pressing topics with than the host of The Rubin Report, the great Dave Rubin. Dave, thank you so much for joining me.
00:00:57
Speaker
Will, it's my pleasure. You know, when we decided to go on this Australia tour, there were a whole host of issues that I i was really looking forward to discussing with with you guys, with all the media people from Australia and the and the Australian audience themselves.
00:01:11
Speaker
But I completely agree on what you just said right there. What has just transpired over the last two weeks and and losing Charlie the way we did, I actually think is is deeply connected now to the battle for Western civilization. And that that's what I'll be bringing to your part of the world, not not too far from now. And I hope we can just dive in as as clearly and honestly and maybe painfully as possible right now.
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah. Three wonderful shows in Australia coming up. We'll get all the details on that in a bit. And you're right. When I was thinking about what we could chat about, i was thinking about the issues that connect the Anglosphere. So I'm speaking from the UK. Obviously, I'm Australian.
00:01:48
Speaker
You're an American. And across those those countries, there are issues around culture, around the economy, around mass migration, where it It feels like they're all echoing each other, but arguably the biggest or or another one of those is is political violence and free speech.
00:02:05
Speaker
So I think it is is worthwhile that we do start there. And I understand that this is, I'm sure, a difficult conversation because you knew Charlie, you were friends with Charlie. What has Charlie's death, but I think perhaps more importantly, the response to Charlie's death revealed to you about modern America?
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah.
Personal Memories and Impact Discussion
00:02:24
Speaker
Well, first, let me just take a moment to talk about Charlie, the man, and the personal side for just a second, because, you know, i think we all get caught, and I include myself in this, we all get caught in immediately going to the political side of all of this, right? And, you know, the day after Charlie was murdered that Friday, i happened to be in New York I was there for the 9-11 anniversary. I was in New York during 9-11 24 years ago, and I was there for an anniversary for it.
00:02:50
Speaker
But then because I was in New York, I ended up at Fox, you know, basically all day long. And Fox has a rule that if you do one show that day on Fox, you don't do the other shows. There's a sort of competition built in with the other shows, and they don't want to pull ratings and this and that.
00:03:04
Speaker
But they basically waived that for me for the day. And I was on like maybe six Fox shows. I was on Piers that day. I was on BBC. ah Just basically all day doing media. And I mentioned that not to pat myself on the back, but to say one of the the traps of doing this, of talking for a living, is like your friend gets murdered and suddenly you're just talking about politics. And I've really tried in the last two weeks to be as human as possible with all of this because Charlie was a good man.
00:03:32
Speaker
there is There are two young children that are now not going to have a father. There is a young wife who is not going to have a husband. There are parents that no longer have their child. You know, beyond touring with Charlie and having, you know, dozens of dinners with him and going to events, I used to do a lot of these college events with him.
00:03:50
Speaker
Charlie and i when we were off camera, we were talking about the exact same stuff that we were talking about on camera. I mean, we really were churning through those ideas, measuring each other up. You know, I originally came from the left. He was always on the right. That's what brought us together because because we thought that would be fun to talk about on stage. That's what started the whole college campus tour thing.
00:04:12
Speaker
but But it wasn't just the political side. We really had to look at each other and measure up. Boy, can I trust this guy? I was like, here I am with a conservative. Can I trust a conservative? Here he is with a liberal, not a bananas progressive liberal, but a liberal nonetheless.
00:04:25
Speaker
And he had to measure me up. So so everything that so that people saw on the public side of Charlie and I is what we were dealing with on the on the personal side. And I would just say, and then I'll answer your question specifically, I would just say, i never saw Charlie, I never saw him act in a way behind the scenes that he didn't act in front of the scenes. He really, you know, and I can and i can't say that for a lot of people in this space.
00:04:49
Speaker
but he But he was a good man who wanted the debate. He wanted to build bridges where it's obviously much easier to burn bridges. And now, more to your question, it's like, well, what do what do we do with this?
Political Violence and Western Civilization
00:05:00
Speaker
Is violence now just going to be baked into the system? You know, I would say, as I said the day he was assassinated,
00:05:09
Speaker
I was shocked, but not but not surprised. It's shocking to see that jarring video. It's shocking to see the murder of another human being. and it And it's shocking to see your friend being murdered.
00:05:23
Speaker
But I wasn't surprised. it didn't It wasn't like, oh my God, this is not something that came out of nowhere. When I toured with Jordan Peterson, we often talked about that these types of things could happen even to us.
00:05:36
Speaker
ah Charlie and I had discussed it on more than one occasion. One time, Charlie, I forget what school we were at, but Charlie and I were walking on stage and some kid threw a cup of coffee at us. And most of it hit me. And I was dressed like this. you know I'm usually in a blazer and shirt. Charlie would just go in the T-shirt.
00:05:51
Speaker
And most of it hit me. And Charlie looked at me. And I said something like, I was like, well, I'm glad that wasn't acid. And Charlie was like, well, that's why I wear T-shirts, Dave. Like, you know, he can just swap that T-shirt out real quick. So all of these things were not things that we never thought of.
00:06:04
Speaker
I would say the issue now is that with the assassination, I mean, this is the most impactful assassination from an American perspective, probably in four decades, right?
00:06:15
Speaker
So to the backdrop of that, now we're having, you know, some of these violent shootings at these ICE facilities, which is happening over the last couple days. We've had all sorts of what you're having in the UK and they're definitely having in Australia. You know, in essence, you're having terrorist rallies, which is what I would say most of these, I have no problem calling them pro-Hamas rallies are.
00:06:34
Speaker
We are really having to grapple in the West with, are you going to be okay with political violence? Are you going to be okay with certain people in your societies that seemingly only exist to tear it down?
00:06:45
Speaker
And what are the good people going to do? What are the limits of tolerance? And I think conservatives are really realizing that tolerance should not be at the top of that hierarchy. And that's been much harder for even the more moderate liberals to realize.
00:07:01
Speaker
That's one of the things I'm really working on right now. I definitely sit on the more liberal end, let's say, of the MAGA tent. What I want my co-liberals to realize is, hey, we're being welcomed into this conservative tent.
00:07:15
Speaker
We have some differences with them, but we've got to tighten. we We have to keep tightening those relationships and we have to stop putting tolerance at the top of everything. Tolerance for intolerance is the best way to get beheaded.
00:07:28
Speaker
And we better start really realizing, not just saying it, but realizing it. Yeah, this is a journey that I've been on myself because I would consider myself a classical liberal or ah a libertarian.
00:07:39
Speaker
And so traditionally, I have thought that that sort of tolerance of distasteful views or aggressive views or even violent views, as long as it doesn't extend out into actual violence, should be a part of ah a classically liberal society.
00:07:54
Speaker
As I have seen, to your point, Hamas Rallies, as you've seen political violence in the form of Charlie's death, as you've seen so many other different instances now where i would say predominantly the left have come out and have said that speech is violence and therefore violence is an acceptable response to speech.
00:08:11
Speaker
I've had to question whether or not that classical liberalism still holds. And where I get to at the moment is classical liberalism works in a high trust society. And it also works in a society which hasn't embraced this multicultural fabric, which is now very much a part of Australia and the UK.
00:08:28
Speaker
think the US is a bit better at managing that. So where I've got to is is that sort of liberalism doesn't work when you have so many different cultural groups, that have different views and many views which don't actually have the same faith in classical liberalism.
00:08:44
Speaker
How would you respond to to whether or not liberalism is can work in a multicultural society?
Viability of Classical Liberalism
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. And you know my first book, Don't Burn This Book, was a defense of classical liberalism. And my belief is actually you are completely right, but that doesn't mean that the classically liberal experiment is not worth fighting for.
00:09:08
Speaker
So in other words, i want as limited government as possible. I want as much free speech as possible. I want laissez-faire economics and I want people to have freedom of association and freedom of thought and all of those things. These are all within the classically liberal tradition.
00:09:24
Speaker
I want most of the things that the Enlightenment was about to flourish. Now, the problem, and you're addressing this quite well, actually, the problem is that because of this strange paradox of tolerance, and we're and particularly in a multicultural society, if we if we can't agree on the fundamentals,
00:09:42
Speaker
Well, then it starts to fall apart. And I would say largely that's why all of the, from an American perspective, certainly, all of the old school liberals, the classical liberals, whatever you want to call them, they're all basically Trump voters at this point.
00:09:57
Speaker
It's not because they're conservatives. Many of them still have certainly more liberal positions on, say, abortion. Some of them may be on, you know, welfare state, you know, Gay marriage, I think a lot of conservative act actually have come around and realize they have their own personal religious beliefs, but that's separate than the state, which was that was Charlie's position, actually.
00:10:17
Speaker
But generally, liberals would have been more leaning into same sex marriage, let's say. But what liberals are realizing is, boy, you need somebody to guard the door. And liberals are not very good at guarding the door. As Douglas Murray, who I know you've had on the show, says, you know, one day the barbarians will be at the gate and we'll be debating what gender pronouns to call them. And that I would put at the foot of the of the liberal, meaning the liberal needs to, it's nice to have your liberal ideas. And most people, by the way, most Americans, we have about 350 million Americans, most Americans, whether they admit it or not, basically are classical liberals.
00:10:52
Speaker
They have what their religious or philosophical beliefs might be, but they actually are okay with people of different beliefs and faiths and all of those things operating. Classical liberalism is actually what the founders, for the most part, believed in. Now, there's there's also a religious component to it that generally would angle people a little more towards saying that they're a conservative.
00:11:14
Speaker
But classical liberalism is worth fighting for. it is worth defending. I do think it is the thing that could get America out of this muck. But we need the liberals to stand up.
00:11:25
Speaker
What we have seen is the liberals fold, and they fold more easily than a wet paper bed. And that's been a really unfortunate position. So the only people that I can really tell you right now are fighting for liberalism on the left.
00:11:38
Speaker
You know, basically you have Bill Maher, who's been, you know, the standard bearer of liberalism in America for 40 years, not leftism, liberalism. I think he's made some mistakes as it pertains to who he votes for and whatever, but he really has, he stayed right on free speech. And even now you can see he's building bridges with Trump and trying to come around.
00:11:57
Speaker
There's not that many left. I mean, if I look at the Democratic Party, there aren't many. I would say from a UK perspective, your Labour Party used to be filled with mostly liberals, Now it's mostly leftists.
00:12:09
Speaker
That's a huge problem. Dennis Prager, for 30 years, has been talking about the difference between leftists and liberals. So to to answer your question, I don't know how classical liberalism can flourish in a multicultural society where you're going to welcome in people who clearly want to destroy your society. This is where I think you need a couple conservatives who come off a little meaner and a little more serious, let's say, who are going to be like, yeah, we got to close the door and we do have to deport some people and everything else.
00:12:38
Speaker
and and And that's why for years I've been saying, ironically, defending my liberal values is becoming a conservative position. So it is not an easy question. I'm glad you asked. But it is a worthy cause. It is something worth worth fighting for.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And we will get back to the broader conversation around multiculturalism. And I want to speak specifically about how Islam fits into that mix.
00:13:05
Speaker
But before we do, I want to go specifically to your point around the importance of continuing to defend classical liberalism.
The 'Woke Right' and Cancellation
00:13:11
Speaker
And this brings in the response of many people on the right to the Charlie's death and then also the, I guess some people would call it the woke right response where there is this and counter cancellation movement where many people are saying, well, look, the left have used these cancellation tactics on us for so long now.
00:13:32
Speaker
No more Mr. Nice Guy. We need to start calling up employers. We need to start banning comedians. We need to start doing all of these different things which have been used against us because the cli classical liberal tools just haven't worked.
00:13:47
Speaker
How do you think about that response from so many people, particularly in the context, say, of of the the Jimmy Kimmel brief cancellation? Sure. Yes, the briefest cancellation in the history of cancellations.
00:14:00
Speaker
but It basically got a three-day vacation. Look, there's a couple things here. First off, on ah on ah the most human sense, I would say you want to be careful not to become your enemy, right? You don't want to look into the abyss long enough because if you do, the abyss might look back and you might realize that you're the bad guy. So you have to be careful about that. And I think, however, I do understand the inclination of people who have been pushed back on their back foot for so long told that they're Nazis and racist, silenced because of COVID, you know, forced to stay at home, missed grandma's funeral, said something that was not racist. Next thing you know, they're out of a job or they've been lambasted on social media.
00:14:36
Speaker
And it's half the country, you know, told they're Nazis. I get the human inclination when you've been pushed for so long. And then finally you have a little momentum. I get the the inclination to push back. I have that inclination myself.
00:14:49
Speaker
Of course, what you don't want is that you're going to push back so far. you're going to come all the way around and be the very thing that you were pushing against. I would say there's a difference between what we went through with cancel culture at the height of it, say four or five years ago, where Roseanne Barr, who had the number one show on television, she put out one tweet they said was racist. Roseanne is the least racist person I have ever met. She's a good friend of mine. She has been a forefront when leftism made sense.
00:15:17
Speaker
She was like a huge lefty. The first gay kiss that was ever on television was her, was literally her kissing someone on her show. She's been a fighter for these people forever. She said she then gets the number one show on television. She puts out one tweet. They get rid of her.
00:15:31
Speaker
And Jimmy Kimmel himself defended the firing of her. There's a quote from him going around on that. Cancel culture is when somebody during COVID said, you know, I'm going to actually just, you know, just a random parent at a school was like, you know what, I'm going to wait. I'm not going to force my kid to get this. And next thing you know, they're out of a job.
00:15:48
Speaker
the The cancel culture that we saw before cancel culture also would be, say, the government working with Facebook and Google to silence people who are against vaccines and mandates, which we now know was ubiquitous and happened to literally millions of people on social media.
00:16:03
Speaker
What we're getting now is I wouldn't say cancel culture. It's a little more accountability for your words. You know, a classically liberal position is that you have freedom of association. So if one of my employees that are sitting in this room right now, if the day that Charlie had died, if on their personal Facebook page,
00:16:21
Speaker
had written, you know, Charlie Kirk was a terrible person and I'm happy about this, I would fire them. I have freedom of association to get rid of them. so i So mostly what we've seen in terms of the pushback against this has been accountability. I mean, anyone that works anywhere, whatever institution you're part of, the institution has a right to decide whether it wants you to be part of it or not. Now, if the government started jailing people If the government had jailed Jimmy Kimmel, if the government had come after anyone on social media who put something stupid up over Jimmy Kimmel, that would be a problem.
00:16:53
Speaker
But there's a real confusion and an insane amount of hypocrisy right now. All of these people going on television talking about Jimmy Kimmel's rights are being attacked.
00:17:04
Speaker
Nobody has a right to a TV show. Jimmy Kimmel, you know what? if you got If you had got fired, again, he got a three-day suspension. Had he got fired, well, he could have done what we do. He could have opened up a YouTube account he would have been just fine.
00:17:16
Speaker
So this is not about free speech in the legal sense. It is about the cultural fight over free speech. And I do think, you know, you guys set some pretty crappy rules. don't don't Don't be surprised when they use it they are used against you.
00:17:30
Speaker
But again, we don't want to become what we were fighting. And that's always that's always a challenge when you suddenly have the culture behind you. That comment amidst that response, it would be an issue if the government started to jail people.
00:17:43
Speaker
Now, that triggered me a tad to use the parlance of our time because the government in the UK are jailing people for comments which would be protected by the First Amendment in the U.S.
Government Control Over Free Speech
00:17:54
Speaker
In Australia, online censorship as well is getting worse and worse.
00:17:57
Speaker
Only today in the UK, Kistama announced digital ID cards across the country, which will, in my opinion, be used as effectively a tool to monitor and control particular behaviours.
00:18:08
Speaker
If there's a common thread across Australia and the UK at the moment, it is this creeping sense that the government wants to control more and more of your life and more and more of particularly what you say in the online realm.
00:18:20
Speaker
How do we push back against that? Because it feels to me like more and more people, sadly, are going, I'm happy to give away my liberties and freedoms if I feel more safe. Yeah.
00:18:30
Speaker
I mean, this is the great challenge for your country and not just your country. You guys seem to be the lab at the moment, but this thing's going to extrapolate and go way beyond your borders. I'll tell you something quite chilling.
00:18:41
Speaker
Over the last 10 years, I've been to the UK probably about eight times, almost once a year or so. And every single time I go, it seems like the country has gotten worse. And every single time that I go, it seems like the spirit has gotten worse.
00:18:53
Speaker
Now, the only counter to that I can tell you is that when Tommy Robinson did his rally a week ago, that was the first time I saw like some pushback at scale. So there's always hope. There's always hope. So, i you know, and I think it's important for people to understand that.
00:19:07
Speaker
how would You should be aware there were there were comparable protests or rallies in Australia only a few weeks before that, very much along the same lines. So there there is some sort of a pushback there as well. Oh, that's wonderful to hear. I actually, that didn't even make it, I didn't even see that on Twitter, but that's wonderful to hear to the backdrop of going to Australia. I love to hear that because actually mostly what I've seen from Australia in the last couple of years beyond draconian lockdowns is is a lot of Hamas rallies. And that's, yeah, that's really upsetting for for many reasons.
00:19:34
Speaker
The UK, Keir Starmer, the UK ah as a whole, is not in good shape. You're right. they are They are slowly taking away people's rights. The digital ID card, which, i again, it's going to go it's not just going to be in the UK. It's going to be all over the place.
00:19:50
Speaker
Obviously, it is go it is the dystopian nightmare of every science fiction writer ever. The idea that you will basically... be able to do things or not do things at the whim of the machine that you either serve or are are against.
00:20:06
Speaker
And if you speak up against, you're going to be in trouble. We've all seen the videos now where there are police officers knocking on doors because an elderly couple posted something about immigration or said something about Islam or whatever. You can see why the Islamists love the leftists in the UK. The green-red alliance that is happening in the UK, which we have a version of it here, they definitely have it in Australia, it is it is unbelievably dangerous. And by the way, i mean, the leftists in this equation, all they're doing is buying themselves five more minutes. Like, the the alliance doesn't end well. You're still going to be beheaded, but yes, you get beheaded right at the end when you've seen everyone else that you know get beheaded. I don't see how that
00:20:42
Speaker
that comes off as very pleasurable or thoughtful or anything else. You might want to be the first one added. It's a little bit better. You don't have to watch everybody you know get be added. This is a huge problem. You guys don't have the First Amendment. It's as simple as that. You do not have something baked into the code that says the government cannot step on your free speech rights.
00:21:00
Speaker
I think the best thing that the United States can do is exert as much pressure on the government of the UK to respect those rights, but we can't, we're we're not going to invade and and we can't force the UK to do anything. I think Keir Starmer is one of the most feckless, embarrassing leaders in in all of Western society, but he's not the only one. I mean, Macron is pathetic.
00:21:21
Speaker
What's going on in Spain is ridiculous. I mean Western Europe has a massive, massive problem. And if I lived in Western Europe and I couldn't make it to America, I might be thinking about Poland or Hungary, although they've got pretty tight borders and it has nothing to do with skin color. So it's a huge problem. And I don't see the way out of it for now. For now, i just I see a country that seemingly is going the wrong way.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, and look, for for your benefit, as you go to Australia in in October, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is effectively another variation of ah of a Keir Starmer, just like Carney in Canada.
00:21:56
Speaker
It feels to me like there is this clique of leaders across the West, with the exclusion of Trump, who are stuck in this bygone age of centre-left technocratic managerialism, which believes in government control and other than that, not much else with these sorts of insincere, nothingy, vacuous figureheads.
00:22:19
Speaker
And when what the US has shown and what kind of people now following reform in the UK, there's a comparable type figure called Pauline Hanson in Australia. What these people are saying is we demand authenticity.
00:22:30
Speaker
We demand a change to this type of, i would say, 30-year period since you know Blair and Clinton of technocratic managerialism. But unfortunately, at the moment, the US s is the only one really trying to push against that, whereas the UK and Australia are two which still very much in the grips of that very outdated worldview.
00:22:48
Speaker
Well, what I would say to that is, you know, look, you never give up on people. People have a way, there is something about humanity that has a way of course correcting. The question is how bad the things get before you course correct.
00:22:59
Speaker
You know, just in the last couple of days as they're having the UN n General Assembly, you're completely right. If you listen to the speeches of most of these guys, it's nothing. They say nothing. Their vision is nothing. There's it's just you're right. It's technocratic drivel.
00:23:14
Speaker
In essence, it's the same types of people who have gotten virtually everything wrong, telling you how they can reorder everything to be right again. And then you have Trump who comes in there and who was I thought his speech was spectacular. He basically said, i mean, he basically said the U.N. is a fraudulent organization. You're a bunch of morons.
00:23:33
Speaker
I believe in freedom. Stop your obsessive, obsessive hatred of Israel and lauding of the Palestinians. Because as you know, in the UK, I mean, all Starmer is doing by recognizing Palestine, mean, this is a bit of a sidebar, but what Macron and Starmer and all these guys, what they're doing basically is they're just trying to buy time with their own Islamists.
00:23:53
Speaker
That's what he's doing. It's the same thing that I said about getting beheaded before with the Red-Green Alliance. It's like Starmer starmer knows his country is going to fall to these guys, and he's trying to buy some time. What you might want to do is elect someone that's brave, that's going to figure out how you're going to deal with the issues there as it pertains to multiculturalism and radical Islam and all those things.
00:24:12
Speaker
But ah Clearly, Starmer is not the guy to do that. He's the guy that's going to offer them. I mean, it's it's literally neville Neville Chamberlain again. Offer them a little something and maybe they'll leave us alone. And that's simply not how the world works.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah. You said that your country will fall to the radical Islamists.
Radical Islam and Western Values
00:24:30
Speaker
Talk me through how you see the threat from Islam. are there Is there such a thing as moderate Muslims? We know that both in Australia and the UK, the percentage of Islamic immigration is getting to the point now where potentially a fifth of both countries to a quarter could be taken up by by people who follow the Islamic faith by the 2050s, 2060s.
00:24:52
Speaker
Talk me through how you see see the threat. Well, look, first off, as a general rule, I try my best to judge people as individuals. So are there individual Muslim people who love the countries they live in, who want to be part of a multicultural society, don't mind people that are other religions or Whatever, of course, the answer to that is yes.
00:25:12
Speaker
Of course. Are there good Muslims and bad Muslims? Of course, are there good Christians and Jews and bad Christians? Yes, of course, all that stuff. But that's like the most low resolution thinking. What you're talking about is at scale, does this thing work?
00:25:26
Speaker
And the the truth is there's no reason to believe that Islam at scale works for anyone other than basically the radical Islamists because it doesn't even work for the nominal Muslims because most women don't want to live in what Bill Maher calls a beekeeper costume.
00:25:41
Speaker
There are gay Muslims. How's it working out for them? Right? Like, so how's it working out for someone that wants to be a free thinker or dress a little bit differently or anything else? It stifles human ingenuity. ah Islam basically means to submit, submission.
00:25:54
Speaker
So if you don't want to submit to it, yes, well, you could live as a dhimmi, or if you're a Muslim that leaves the faith, that they're going to come and kill you. That's a problem, right? I mean, you can leave Christianity, while many Christians may want you to come back, there's very little evidence they're going to come kill you.
00:26:09
Speaker
You can leave Judaism, there's very little evidence that a Jew is going to come behead you for it. So these things are not all equal. And the simple truth is that there are something like 50 majority Muslim states.
00:26:22
Speaker
And in those states, there are virtually no minorities anymore. Ask the Coptic Christians who are the last holdout in Egypt, how's it going? There is no Jews that live in any of these countries anymore. You know, there's six Jews.
00:26:33
Speaker
I love how they're always like, well, there's six Jews that live in Iran and there are two in Morocco still and it's all just nonsense. We know it's not good for minorities. And then the question is, well, why is it so you have your countries where you have your rule and it's usually not even good for the average person there.
00:26:48
Speaker
But then you want to export these people who who seemingly don't want to, whose ideology is at odds with the Western nations that they are in And unfortunately, you know, and this, America has done it better. We've integrated people in a much better way. You know, we had a melting pot where most of Europe sort of kept people separate, but you kind of lived in the same borders.
00:27:10
Speaker
But it was very like, oh, these people live here, these people live here. America did a much, we're much younger nation. The geography of it, the the funding the founding ideals of revolution. I mean, we just did it in a better way. It's not to say we don't have problems with it. There's also a stronger sense of identity in America now as well to say to people who come into the country, get on board with our history, our values, our ideals, or if not, bugger off effectively.
00:27:34
Speaker
Whereas this self-loathing instinct, which is very prevalent in the UK and Australia, which is critical of their own history, critical of the broader Western civilis civilization project, basically almost venerates those sorts of other cultures at the expense of your own.
00:27:50
Speaker
That is what I see as the key distinction. That is true. However, I would say, we trust me, we have plenty of that in America too. I mean, we have a basic, we have a Democrat party and an entire media you know machine that pushes that nonsense all day long. you know The New York Times telling us that the 1619 Project was the true founding of America, that you know that that the the driving ideology of the founders was slavery. i mean, it's complete and utter nonsense. We fought a civil war to end slavery as ah as a young nation. I mean, it's just it's just crazy, as if slavery didn't exist for thousands and thousands of years, well before the United States was ever even a dream.
00:28:26
Speaker
So yes, we do have some we have some version of that sickness, but we also, we just, we were born in revolution that, that and we're an armed society. And we're a massively huge country that has states' rights. So people have, there's been an ongoing experiment to move to places that are more in line with where you live. I was in California, communist California during COVID, and now I live in the free state of Florida.
00:28:49
Speaker
They're wildly different, right? In most countries, you know, if you don't like it, you basically have to leave the country. But our states' rights, our idea of federalism allowed me, I didn't have to leave the United States because I couldn't stay in California, I moved to the freest state and the freest nation in the world. And that's why Florida is flourishing right now.
00:29:09
Speaker
But anyway, to answer your question, I mean, at scale, there's simply no reason to think it is going to work. I think if you're in London, you have a huge problem. Your mayor is an Islamist. And it's that that's not, I don't think that's controversial.
00:29:21
Speaker
He is. they They want Islam to be the state religion. They want people to convert. They do not want anyone to leave. Everyone kind of knows it. I get why everyone's afraid to say it But show me a place where Islam has taken root that is good for anyone else when they're a majority. And then show me a place where they're a minority where it's working. So it it works both ways. When they're a majority, there are no minorities. And when they're a minority, they seem to hate the majority.
00:29:50
Speaker
I would love to hear another version of that if it exists. I think that's a good way of framing it because a lot of people who try and defend Islam Islam in a community will pick out their nice Muslim neighbor and say, well, there's not a problem there.
00:30:04
Speaker
But it's that comment at scale and looking at every example across the world where you have Islam at scale. And you're right, there isn't an example of where that is compatible with liberal values. And by the way, the one example that you might be able to come up with where they live as a minority peacefully, believe it or not, is Israel, because Israel has 8 million Jews and 2 million Muslim Arabs.
00:30:26
Speaker
that are so full citizens of Israel who have sat on the Supreme Court and who are doctors and in the Knesset and all of those things. And the reason, now it doesn't mean that everything's perfect there, but what it shows you is that those two million Arabs, even to the backdrop, ah two million Muslim Arabs over the last two years, post-October 7th, what they've come to realize is they may not they may not love the idea of the Jewish state of Israel,
00:30:51
Speaker
But they know that their ability to live freely in the entire Middle East is protected by Israel more than any other place. Where can they protest the government? They can do it all day long in Israel if they want.
00:31:02
Speaker
Go try to do it in Egypt. See what happens if you're a Palestinian trying to protest in Jordan. They'll put that shit down pretty quickly. So there's there's an irony. The place that the lefties and the Islamists hate the most is the one place that has anything remotely close to coexistence in the entire region.
00:31:19
Speaker
Some people would make the argument that Dubai is a successful example of an Islamic society that is largely tolerant. How would you respond to that?
Tolerance in Dubai's Islamic Context
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah. So there is there are some good signs, by the way. Some of the Gulf states, particularly Dubai, UAE a little bit, like there are some good things happening.
00:31:35
Speaker
But ironically, what did they do? They've outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood. i mean, the Muslim Brotherhood is the main driver of the radicalism in your country and what we have in in our country. So I think Trump is probably, he either did He may have done it or they were talking about a few weeks ago that he was going to put the Muslim Brotherhood back on the terrorist watch list. I think he did do it.
00:31:54
Speaker
But they've completely outlawed it. You know, they don't allow for Palestinian rallies and flags to be happen in in the UAE. There is a reason. Maybe we should listen to them. Yeah, I think that's a ah that's that's a fair point.
00:32:07
Speaker
You mentioned Trump. I want to go to to Trump. And particularly, I want to think about what comes after Trump. so Trump has refashioned what it means to be ah not just a Republican, what it means to be a right-wing conservative politician around the world in 2025.
00:32:23
Speaker
But so much of that is around his particular personality and the force of nature that is Donald Trump. What do you think comes after Donald Trump for the right in America when hey and he finishes up?
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it's it's only in our biz, it's always like, you don't want to predict too much because you're probably going to be wrong on predictions. I'm usually right about the the things that are happening as they're happening. Predictions can be tough.
00:32:49
Speaker
But I would say this, what Donald Trump has done in the world, everyone knows, is is beyond imagination. He He did the thing that no one said could be done, and he did it repeatedly, and he fought the system, and he won.
00:33:00
Speaker
He widened the Republican tent to the point that you have Bobby Kennedy, who was a Democrat two years ago as part of his cabinet, Tulsi Gabbard, who ran as a Democrat you know a couple of years ago, is a Democrat, Joe Rogan, who definitely was not a conservative, is not a conservative part of it.
00:33:15
Speaker
I'm part of it. Elon Musk. I mean, he brought he what he basically said was, I love America, I'm going to try to stop some of the nonsense. The left has gone bananas. Let's do this. What I've always worried about, and I fought very hard to make sure that wide tent would would stay strong, what I've always worried is you have a lot of competing interests in that group, right? You have a lot of people. There's a more religious side of it. There's a completely secular side of it.
00:33:39
Speaker
You have people that are definitely on the more liberal end. That's probably where I fall. Then you have people that are on a definitely more traditionally conservative end. it's But that's what politics is. And it's that's the irony of Trump.
00:33:50
Speaker
Trump actually, because he wasn't a politician, became the best politician of all time because he basically was like, I love this country. I want you to get bored and we can not worry about our differences. You know, even the the abortion thing, it's so fascinating what's happened in America.
00:34:07
Speaker
Because, you know, Trump came in he appointed judges that were very conservative. They reversed Roe v. Wade. That did not make abortion illegal. All it did was kick it back to the states. Now, in the two years since roe v. Wade's been reversed, I haven't heard one story. You know, the the left was saying, oh, my God, all these women are going to die and there's going to be all these back...
00:34:24
Speaker
alley abortions and all this endless craziness. I have not heard one story about that. I have not heard one story of a young woman that didn't, that wanted an abortion that couldn't get one. But what he did, but what that proved then was, hey, I'm more conservative, so we are going to kick things back to the states, even controversial things like abortion.
00:34:41
Speaker
But then it puts the onus back on you as a citizen to figure out where you want to live. And if abortion is the most important thing to you, then go to Cal, live in Cali and have an eight month abortion. If it's not, you could live in Florida where we have the heartbeat bill eight weeks. Okay, you have to decide.
00:34:56
Speaker
But the point is he widened the tent by getting the government out of the way, right? It was less federal government control over something. He widened the tent. And even the most hysterical abortion activists, well, I don't know that they would acknowledge that, but I think if they had truth serum, maybe they would see that.
00:35:13
Speaker
So the challenge for the Republicans post-Trump is do you veer towards something that's much more ethnocentric? And I think what, you know, you mentioned woke, right? Like, is there some version that's going to grab that that's going to be like hyper-religious and identity politics based, which kind of would give you the horseshoe theory of politics?
00:35:35
Speaker
Or can you hold Trump has has created Obviously, that's the the future that I want for the party. That's what I will continue to fight for. And that's what I hope will happen. But I mean, we will find out, you know, this Charlie thing has really altered things.
00:35:49
Speaker
And, you know, it's it's going to take time to see what the real fall at ah out of that is. There's another group that you didn't mention that Trump has brought into the conservative fold, and that's young people. Now, look, still the majority of young people are closer to the purple-haired, loony, lefty side than the right side of the spectrum.
00:36:10
Speaker
But the way that Trump has managed to capture a large number of 18 to 30-year-olds has been extraordinary. Similarly, in in the yeah UK, Farage and the reform movements are capturing a lot of young people.
00:36:23
Speaker
I think you would see a similar trend across most Western countries now where young people are pushing back against ideologies which traditionally they have um embraced. Why do you think young people are becoming more conservative across the US and the West?
00:36:37
Speaker
Well, it's interesting because I don't know that they're becoming more conservative per se, but they're they're just kind of like, look at you clowns. Look at all you other clowns. If you were a young person in the UK right now, so you're 18 years old, you're in the UK, what would possibly draw you to Keir Starmer? Now, if you're a young radical Islamist, I could see why you'd be into Keir Starmer. He seems sympathetic to your view.
00:36:59
Speaker
If you're a genderqueer sort of brain-broken furry, I could kind of see why you're into it. It's not going to work very long, right? Because again, the Islamists and the furries, ah over time, this is not going to work out well for the furries.
00:37:11
Speaker
But I could see why you'd be like, oh, here's someone who says he cares about me. But if you're the average 18-year-old and you're looking around and you're like, you know, my country doesn't seem like my country anymore. I'm a little afraid to post what I really think. I don't think I'm racist. I don't think the founding of our country was terrible, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:37:30
Speaker
You would just kind of want these people out of the way, in essence. And I think that that's what Trump has done. he From an American perspective, Trump's not in anyone's way. You want to do whatever you want to do in your life, go ahead and do it. That's the American dream. And Trump loves the American dream.
00:37:45
Speaker
So I'm not even sure. i think that the purple haired, whatever, they are loud. They are at campuses there. Yes, there is a lot of them. But I think the human spirit has a way of course correcting on a lot of this stuff. And and hopefully, hopefully we see that not just here, but all over the place.
00:38:02
Speaker
Yeah, there's a separate but related conversation here, which I've spoken about with people like Constance and Kissin and John Anderson. ah And that is, that that there is a ah crisis of purpose and meaning amongst young people, a malaise amongst young people.
Purpose and Meaning for Young People
00:38:16
Speaker
And partly it's practical. Like I would suggest that this generation, my generation actually, you know, between 25 to thirty five ah will be the first generation in modern history where standard of living will be worse than your parents' standard of living, statistically on on average.
00:38:33
Speaker
I was told the other day you'll be going to Sydney. In my grandparents' generation, if you wanted to buy a house in Sydney, you were looking at something like two to three times your annual salary. My parents' generation, seven to eight times your annual salary.
00:38:48
Speaker
And our generation, 16 to 18 times your annual salary to get into the property market. And now most young people just go, well, this is too hard. You add into that the fact that religion is on the decline across the yeah UK and Australia and the US, but at a slower rate.
00:39:04
Speaker
All of this stuff is bubbling together. And I think you have this group of young people who are going, ah I don't have any meaning. I don't have any purpose. You speak with young people all the time. you agree with that? And, geez, this is a big question, but what do you do about it?
00:39:17
Speaker
well Well, obviously, i don't know I don't disagree with anything you said there, but I would say some of that is to the backdrop of just try to remember when you're young, so now you're you know you're a late teenager or something. like You're not really thinking about the price of house of housing just yet.
00:39:33
Speaker
You're concerned about your peers, your friends, what do they think about you you got acne, blah, blah, blah, all these other things, right? But then, you know, you were also handed a phone when you were probably 12.
00:39:45
Speaker
And the amount of information, both good and bad, that has been slammed and force fed into your brain is unimaginable for someone like me, who's 49, which is not that old, but I as a Gen Xer, which is what Elon is,
00:39:58
Speaker
I'm the last generation that fully remembers a portion, at least of my adult life, before the phone. I got my first cell phone a few days before 9-11, actually, which I remember vividly because i had never even used it until on 9-11 when my father, who lived in New York City and saw the second tower, was calling me on my cell phone and I couldn't believe it because I had never even seen the thing light up before.
00:40:19
Speaker
But that's not that long ago. That's 24 years ago. And now we all have the world and we gave it to kids. And I don't blame anyone for this. But with the, you know, between what we're learning about Discord servers and Reddit and all the stuff and all the manipulation, we've broken a generation's brain. So I think there's all sorts of things related to anxiety and clicks and attention spans that have been blown apart. So all of that stuff, right? So you take all of that.
00:40:48
Speaker
that hit young and then COVID and then they missed their graduation. and they've also found out that people lied to them relentlessly and forced them to be injected with things that don't work. So you take this horrifically toxic stew and then combine it to what you just talked about, which is all the young adult stuff. Right.
00:41:03
Speaker
So now you then also got a degree that was kind of useless, right? Lesbian basket weaving. Okay. So you got, now you have all this shit, you get your lesbian basket weaving, degree Now you're in the real world and you get some nominal job, which by the way, are also going to go away largely because of AI and robotics.
00:41:19
Speaker
And then you get to what you just talked about, ah about the housing crisis. Now you have like an unbelievable existential crisis for society.
00:41:30
Speaker
What I would say is a lot of the bad guys that we've talked about here, the Keir Starmers and that managerial class, they want that because they want to put everybody in 15-minute cities. They want you to be dependent on the government. They don't really want you to travel while they foie gras on their private planes. I mean, I don't think these are really conspiracy theories per se.
00:41:46
Speaker
They're never going to give up any of their luxuries, but they seem to want us to give up ours. So if you if you basically say to young people, you know what? You're never going to buy a house. Well, you know what? Then you'll just kind of keep them in perpetual, oh, I just have to have enough of something to go on. And that's what our our welfare system did in many ways to young black people for generations.
00:42:08
Speaker
The more you give people something, the more they will become dependent on you. And that's why what you want is a government that really just basically stays out of the way. Protect the borders. Make sure we're not killing each other to whatever extent the government can do that and get out of our way. But that's not what most of these guys are that interested in.
00:42:25
Speaker
ah You just pointed to something which yeah a lot of people on the right think about, which is you know the potential of a shady international cabal you know run out of Davos that is coordinating all of these types of big government interventionist type policies.
00:42:42
Speaker
In fact, he's probably the great conspiracy theory on the right. How do you explain the fact that so many Western governments now in Australia and the UK and Canada are three great examples, all seem to have a very, very similar type of ideology and they're all trying to promote all of these things at the same time to the extent that that recognition for Israel, for Canada, for across UK, Canada, Israel, UK, Canada, Australia was all announced on on exactly the same day.
Coordination Among Western Governments
00:43:12
Speaker
Yeah, well, I would say this. It's one of my favorite lines by great thinker Carl Sagan, who unfortunately is no longer with us. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So I can't tell you that I have the evidence that all of this like emanates out of Davos at the WEF. Now, we have a lot of circumstantial evidence around that. They have their yearly conference where they basically tell us all of these things and a lot of these leaders show up. So is there something there that feels a little fishy? Yes.
00:43:36
Speaker
The evidence also would be that what you just said, like out of nowhere, you know, it's sort of like two years post-October 7th, all the bad guys realized, man, we can't kill all these Jews. They just keep fighting these freaking Jews.
00:43:48
Speaker
So what can we do? We can't beat them in warfare. We'll beat them in lawfare. So they basically overnight. Congratulations. The UK existed a place that the UK acknowledged an existence of a place that never existed.
00:43:59
Speaker
The state of Palestine, okay, it doesn't exist. Who's the leader? What are their institutions? It doesn't exist. I think Australia did it too, as you mentioned, France did it. It just doesn't mean anything. And by the way, that's exactly what Trump said to these people. But your question is about the coordination level.
00:44:13
Speaker
At the end, is it just that marginal thinkers kind of think the same way? That probably is it more than anything else. Yeah, I also put it down to the way that educational institutions across the West have been so successfully corrupted and taken over.
00:44:30
Speaker
And this is why whenever that question comes up, are we past peak woke? My answer, whether it be on this podcast or on TV or wherever is, I don't think we necessarily are. Maybe the loony stuff, you know, Black Lives Matter and trans ideology, that sort of thing.
00:44:44
Speaker
We may be past the very fringe stuff, but educational institutions have now corrupted, you know, young people from the age of five all the way through to university, and they're going to continue taking that through.
00:44:55
Speaker
You go. i'm sorry. I think that's completely right. and then unfortunately, I only have time for one more question because there I have to jump to signing off Fox. But to your point, I think you're completely right.
Dave Rubin's Tour Plans in Australia
00:45:03
Speaker
I think most of us, myself included, I think we probably thought that Trump's election meant that woke was crushed or at least mostly crushed.
00:45:10
Speaker
But you're right. What we've seen is a communist who also I think is an Islamist is about to be elected mayor of New York City. So it's not that it was defeated. It just kind of recalibrated right in front of us with a soft lens and lo-fi music in the background. And that's what that's what we have to worry about.
00:45:25
Speaker
My final question will will enable you to get a plug in. You are coming to Australia in October. Three awesome shows, Capital Theatre in Melbourne, Cracking Venue, October 18. Concourse Concert Hall in Sydney, October 21.
00:45:36
Speaker
Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre on October 27. I imagine there will be messages of of hope that you'll be putting out there as well as some warnings for dear Australian audiences.
00:45:47
Speaker
You know, what, as you think about the conversations you want to have, what is what is one warning that you have for us as, I guess, as a Western civilization? And then perhaps, you know, just so we don't get too depressed, what's a message of hope that you would leave us on?
00:45:59
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you this, you know, I've been to Australia once. It was when I was on tour with Jordan Peterson and one of the most thrilling days of my professional life. It was the last stop on the tour that we did after about 120 shows in 20 countries. We did the Sydney Opera House in an afternoon and Jordan and I, it was an absolutely beautiful day.
00:46:16
Speaker
And we walked down that boardwalk. just with us. We didn't even have security with us at the time. It was a very different world. And we walked down and all these people are coming with us, walking to the show. And it was just a magical day. And the opera house is gorgeous. I didn't even realize until I was there that it's a theater in the round. So you have audience around you every which way. The acoustics were magical. It was just a wonderful, wonderful way to end the tour for us.
00:46:38
Speaker
And I've loved Australia ever since then. We traveled the entire country, were there for about 10 days. i was supposed to do an Australian tour for my first book, which then got canceled for COVID. So I'm very excited to come back, but I would say this.
00:46:50
Speaker
ah A few days after October 7th, there was that riot outside of the opera house ah the Sydney Opera House where they were calling for gassing the Jews and all those things. And I thought, wow, what what a strange world. One of the most wonderful moments of my career took place right there. And then here in Australia, where I know that doesn't represent the average Australian any more than these people represent the average British person.
00:47:12
Speaker
But that shows you, well, it gets down to the dichotomy that I think much of this conversation has been about. So I want to go to Australia and I want to find the good people and I want to find, and I know that's most of the country and I want to drink some fosters and I want to, you know, jump in a kangaroo's pouch and see what's going on. I just love, I love the Australian spirit and and I'm very curious to see, you know, why is it that Australia went so haywire during COVID? Why was Melbourne locked the way it was?
00:47:37
Speaker
and And I'm just curious to see what the connections are that we still have between our countries and and where're where the disconnects are. and And I'm really looking forward to it. And I thank you for having me on.
00:47:48
Speaker
that is the great question facing modern Australia, and I hope you get to the bottom of it. Dave, this has been a great privilege for me. Everyone listening and watching, link to the show is in the show notes. Go and get a ticket. So you say g'day to Dave Rubin in Australia, mate. An absolute honor. Thank you very much for coming on.
00:48:04
Speaker
Thanks, Will. I appreciate it.