- One of the hearings I chaired,
we had testimony from a
guy named Dr. Epstein.
- Oh yeah, I know about it.
- And he's a psychologist,
used to be the editor
of Psychology Today.
He's an academic,
he's by the way,
not a conservative,
he's a liberal Democrat
who voted for Hillary Clinton
and openly supported
Hillary Clinton.
And he did empirical research
on Google's manipulative
search outcomes.
So it's interesting psychology.
When you type in a
search, the auto-correct,
the auto fill in not
the auto-correct,
but what automatically populates
makes a huge difference.
And the first few
stories that come up
make a huge difference.
And there was a
dramatic differential
between when you typed
in Hillary Clinton,
it would auto-populate
good things.
- [Dave] Yeah, all
good things, yeah.
- When you typed
in Donald Trump,
it would auto-populate
bad things.
And the stories
that would come up
would be predominantly
good stories for Hillary,
predominantly bad
stories for Trump.
And what was interesting
is Dr. Epstein did the study
and he concluded that in 2016,
Google's deceptive
search outcomes shifted
2.4 million votes
to Hillary Clinton.
And he said this as a
Hillary Clinton supporter,
but he was horrified,
but he also projected,
he said in 2015,
he said, big tech
is getting worse.
It's getting more aggressive.
They could move as many
as 15 million votes
to the Democrats in 2020.
And so I think
it's a huge threat.
(soft upbeat music)
- I'm Dave Rubin, and
this is the Rubin report.
Quick reminder everybody
to subscribe to
our YouTube channel
and click that notification bell
so that you maybe just maybe
actually see our
videos in your feed.
And joining me today
is a Republican
Senator from Texas,
the cohost of the
Verdict podcast
and a man who uses almost
as many Star Wars references
on Twitter as I do,
Senator Ted Cruz,
welcome to the Rubin Report.
- Dave it's great
to be with you.
And I will say I'm
learning already
as you start with telling people
to subscribe on your feed.
So I'm a much newer
YouTuber and podcaster.
And so that is good tutelage.
- Yes, well I'm going to
need you in the Senate
to fight the battles
that I have been fighting
on YouTube for quite some time.
All right, so we're obviously
gonna get into big tech.
I also should
mention we're dressed
virtually exactly the same,
which is a little weird,
but you've brought the--
- Well and look at the--
- Texas boots.
- I told you, we need to,
these are Lucchese Ostrich
which are tough to beat,
and I've had these
resoled several times,
but they're good.
All right, here's
something interesting.
We were talking a minute ago
about how you grew
up in New York.
Do you know where I started
wearing cowboy boots?
- Well, I'm gonna guess
New York for some reason,
or maybe Jersey.
- New Jersey.
- Why Jersey,
Jersey, cowboy boots what.
- It's a weird story.
So I grew up in Houston
and in Houston, but I was,
as a sort of junior high
and high school kid,
I was kind of a preppy
kid for a while.
Had long hair, had
a spike for a while.
I mean, went through
these different phases,
but I was a city boy.
And so I didn't wear boots
in school growing up.
And then I went to college
at Princeton in New Jersey
and I was 17 and I
was away from home
and I just got homesick.
And so I said, all right,
I'm gonna go buy
a pair of boots.
And it was sort of a
way for a 17 year old
to kind of hold onto your home.
And so I started wearing boots
as a freshmen in college
and I've worn them ever since,
but it took going to New Jersey,
which is a little ridiculous
to start wearing boots.
- So you were basically
the Texas boots guy
at Princeton university.
- So I remember I had a car
that my grandfather
had given me,
it was a '78 Ford Fairmont.
We called it the green balm.
And I remember digging
that car out of the snow
using the heel of my boots,
which by the way
doesn't work very well,
but really like bad idea.
But as a Texas teenager,
I didn't know anybody.
We got it out, but it was...
- But here we are.
All right, moving on
from boots for a moment.
The one other important
thing that we have to get to
before all the issues,
the beard situation.
Because I think like me,
you've now become
more beard than man
at this point.
Something happened when,
how long you've had the beard?
About like a year
and a half maybe?
- Yeah year and a half.
- Something like that?
- So it was Thanksgiving,
two years ago.
- Okay, so about two years.
Something happened to
me when I got the beard
which was about three
years ago or so,
I sensed the change in me.
Do you sense that change?
You seem to have gotten
a little more feisty on
Twitter since the beard.
Is there a connection?
- There's a little bit
of just kind of screw it.
I mean that, all right,
so what prompted?
Why did you get the beard?
- I go off the
grid every August.
I shut down, no phone,
no TV, nothing, no news.
And it's, I've done
it for three years.
I'm about to do it
in a couple of weeks.
And the first time I did it,
I just decided not to shave.
I came back, everybody
said they loved the beard.
And then it took over
like black Spiderman.
I know you're also a video
comic book guy, yeah.
- So actually my beard
story is very much the same.
It was Thanksgiving.
I mean, holidays, I never shave.
And so I would
always try to grow
a little bit of stubble
during holidays.
And it just kind of
over Thanksgiving,
I said, all right, pack with it.
I'm not gonna shave it.
It was not,
there was no profound statement.
It was just kind of like
this'll be interesting.
- And then Twitter likes it
and you pretty much
have to bow to the mob.
- The guy who runs my
political operation,
he emailed me when I came back
and his email was
like, worst idea ever!
So I had to be like,
alright to heck with you.
Then I'm definitely keeping it.
- Yeah, you're also
a Simpson's guy.
I mean, we could
do every reference,
basically every '80s
and '90s reference,
we could just set aside politics
and do that the whole time.
- I don't think I've seen
Twitter get more angry
than when I said a
couple of years ago
that I thought every
character but Lisa Simpson
was right of center.
That Homer, Marge,
Bart and Maggie
are all conservatives
and libertarians
and Lisa is the self
righteous leftist.
And what was interesting,
look I was mostly
just kind of riffing,
but the Twitter world went nuts.
Like they could not
handle and they're like,
don't try understand
Lisa's the hero.
And I'm like, yeah, except
she's self-righteous
and criticizing everyone
and a pain in the ass.
Look, Homer is every man.
I mean, he's...
- He's basically a
libertarian, right?
- Bart clearly is a
libertarian rebel.
I mean that,
Maggie, do you remember
the episode "Maggie
is in the Ayn Rand
School for Tots",
and then they do the
greatest skate music
and she escapes from it.
So I'm calling Maggie,
and by the way, Maggie
is also a gun owner.
Cause she shot Mr. Burns.
So and then all right,
Merge is--
- Yeah, So Marge
that's the tough one here.
- But look, Marge is--
- She's traditional.
- She's traditional.
She's the anchor of the family.
She keeps everyone together.
She gets Homer to be a good dad.
Marge is the one that
there's the fewest edition,
but it,
the left hates when
anything in pop culture,
they want to own it all.
And so, it's good to have fun.
- Now that we've gotten
the important stuff
out of the way,
let's talk about big tech
because you've been right
in the center of this thing.
As you know, I've
been fighting it
from my garage for
the last five years.
Trump did this executive action.
230 is the, what do you call it?
It's not a bill.
It's a...
- So it's section 230--
- Section 230.
- Of a bill called the
Communications Decency Act.
- Right, so
basically what he did
was stripped some protections
from the big boys,
from Twitter,
YouTube and Facebook.
Now my personal preference
and I think we're
pretty close on this.
The libertarian side
is you don't want
the government running
around sending regulators
to these companies
'cause that's not gonna do good,
but stripping protections
to me seemed like
the right idea.
Do you agree it
was the right idea?
Is it enough?
Is it not enough, et cetera.
- So I think it
is the right idea.
It's something I'd
been urging Trump to do
for three years
so I'm glad that the
administration did it.
Listen, I agree with
your sensibility.
Nobody wants government
free speech police.
I mean that would be
a terrible outcome.
- Well, some people do but...
- Nobody who's not insane,
and that's a qualifier,
we can talk about some more
because there are
a lot of people
that fall into that category,
but government
free speech police
would be a terrible outcome.
But what big tech is doing,
it's deliberate, it's
conscious, it's naked.
It's abusive and it's dangerous.
I think it's the
single biggest threat
to free speech and democracy
we have in this country.
Because big tech has
become a monopoly,
controlling the instruments
of communication.
And I've chaired multiple
hearings in the Senate
on big tech censorship.
And one of the hearings,
we talked about a document
that Google had prepared
it's called the good sensor.
So they prepared, its
PowerPoint about 50 page long.
And it talks about how the
old vision of the internet
was the free speech
laissez-faire internet,
where people could speak
and say what they wanted.
And then it talked about
the new vision of the internet.
And this is Google's own words
is the European style
censorship model.
And by the way,
the four companies
that Google identified
as implementing it
were Google, YouTube,
Facebook and Twitter.
This is a conscious decision
and the dangers are enormous.
So the question is,
how do you fix it?
If it is a problem,
we have a long discussion
about whether it's a problem,
although they're not
hiding it anymore.
- Yeah, I think most
sane people at this point
would agree that there,
even people that disagree
with us politically on this,
I think most people realize that
the extraordinary amount
of power is a problem
one way or another.
- So I will,
it's interesting the
political debate though,
one of the talking points
at big tech in the left
is they don't engage
in censorship.
And the reason they say that
is they say, well, there
are no objective data
that prove we do.
And it's,
there's the old aphorism
of the guy who kills his parents
and then pleads
mercy on the court
'cause he's an orphan.
It's true, there are
no objective data
because big tech
controls all the data
and there's zero transparency,
zero accountability.
So you can use anecdotes
and I've gone
through lots and lots
of specific anecdotes,
but every time you ask big tech
and I've done it in writing,
I've done it in hearings,
simple questions.
All right, in the
2018 election cycle,
how many posts from Republican
candidates for office
did you block or shadow ban?
How many posts from Democratic
candidates for office
did you block or shadow ban?
Their objective
answer's to that.
There is a number
and they know the number
and they refuse to
answer it and then say,
there are no data.
And so how do you fix it?
I think one way to fix it
is getting rid of
the special immunity
from liability that big tech has
that Congress gave them.
- So that's 230, right?
- That's 230.
And the reason 230 was passed,
Congress believed
big tech would be
a neutral public forum.
In other words,
it wasn't fair to sue Facebook
for a comment made by
an individual commenter
'cause it wasn't, they
weren't the speaker,
it was someone else.
And so that was
Congress's reasoning.
So we're gonna give big tech
this immunity from liability
because it's third
party speakers
and we want to see
the internet grow.
Well, what's happened is
big tech changed their mind.
They said, we're
not going to be,
to use the language of
the Google document,
the laissez-faire free
speech place anymore,
we're going to sensor,
well, you know what?
If they're gonna silence
views they disagree
and promote views
they agree with
they don't deserve,
I don't believe as a
public policy matter,
a special protection
for liability.
There's also the antitrust laws.
Google is a monopoly.
By any measure, big tech
is richer, stronger,
more powerful than AT and T was
when it was broken up
under the antitrust laws.
They're bigger than
bigger than US Steel was,
a line from the godfather,
were bigger than US Steel,
well they were
bigger than US Steel.
And that abuse of power,
so I've also, you wanna
talk about the real,
what the Trump administration
did on section 230
will be challenged.
It's at the FCC.
There'll be litigation.
The real bite here
is federal antitrust litigation,
which I have urged the
president to pursue,
I have urged the vice
president pursue,
I've urged the attorney
general to pursue,
I've urged the chairman
of the Federal Trade
Commission to pursue,
I've urged the White House
chief of staff to pursue,
I've urged the White
House Counsel to pursue,
to force the transparency,
to get the answers
and to stop their naked bias.
- Are you worried though
that as we sit here right
now in the middle of July
only three, four months
before an election
that in a certain way that
the ship has already sailed,
the damage that they've done.
And even if you could get
everything you wanted tomorrow,
pass tomorrow,
by the time the processes
and the systems are implemented,
congratulations, the
elections passed.
- I am deeply worried about it.
One at one of the
hearings I chaired,
we had testimony from a
guy named Dr. Epstein.
- Oh yeah, I know about it.
- And he's a psychologist.
He used to be the editor
of Psychology Today.
He's an academic.
He's by the way,
not a conservative,
he's a liberal Democrat
who voted for Hillary Clinton
and openly supported
Hillary Clinton.
And he did empirical research
on Google's manipulative
search outcomes.
So it's interesting psychology.
When you type in a search,
the auto-correct,
the auto-fill in not
the auto-correct,
but what automatically
populates,
makes a huge difference.
And the first few
stories that come up,
make a huge difference.
And there was a
dramatic differential
between when you typed
in Hillary Clinton,
it would auto-populate
good things.
- [Dave] Yeah, all
good things, yeah.
- When you typed
in Donald Trump,
it would auto-populate
bad things.
And the stories
that would come up
would be predominantly
good stories for Hillary,
predominantly bad
stories for Trump.
And what was interesting is
Dr. Epstein did the study
and he concluded that in 2016,
Google's deceptive
search outcomes shifted
2.4 million votes
to Hillary Clinton.
And he said this as a
Hillary Clinton supporter,
but he was horrified,
but he also projected,
he said in 2015,
he said, big tech
is getting worse.
It's getting more aggressive.
They could move as many
as 15 million votes
to the Democrats in 2020.
And so I think
it's a huge threat.
- So as a sci-fi guy,
cause I know you're
a sci-fi guy,
in a certain way,
doesn't it feel like
we're already in
the dystopian future
that we're always worried about
that so many great
movies are about that.
In a way we're kind
of there already.
- We are because the
power and ubiquity,
I mean, what makes
social media different,
look, there's all sorts
of biased media outlets.
The New York times is
ridiculously biased,
but you can pick it up
and you can say, okay,
this is a partisan rag
and you can know it.
What is so such a game
changer with social media
is that it's invisible.
So if they don't
like what you say,
you can post and it
just fades into ether
and you don't know,
you have no idea.
So I've got,
on Twitter, I think
my personal Twitter,
I think we've got 3.7
million followers.
I have no idea to this date.
I've asked by the way the CEO,
when I post something,
what percentage of the people
who've chosen to
follow me see it.
They won't answer.
- Did you know
that shadow banning
is actually in the
Twitter terms of service?
- I have not seen that.
- There's a...
I'll show it to you after this
or my guys can maybe pull it up
and we'll show it right now,
in their terms of service
when they renewed
it on January 1st,
because they know
nobody's paying attention,
it actually says that
they can throttle accounts
and not throttle accounts.
So they're telling us
in their own terms of service
that it's in there
and then the guys get
up on Capitol Hill
and they tell you
we don't do it.
- It is, the magnitude
of the power.
And you know, you talk
about dystopian worlds,
the hard left, and
I'm interested Dave.
So you used to be
a man of the left
and--
- Nobody's perfect.
- You're not now.
Why?
I'd be interested in...
- My audience has
heard it many times,
but I'll give you the
bumper sticker version was,
one day it just hit me
that it could not
possibly be true
that everyone I
disagree with is a bigot
and a racist and a homophobe.
And I know that sounds
almost cliche to say,
but every argument of the
left came down to that.
And I could not believe
somehow that I was
so morally right
about every position
that I had come to
and that everyone else
was so ridiculously evil.
Like it was basically
a math equation
and I was like, the math
doesn't work here anymore.
It can't be right.
And then the bizarre
thing that happened,
and I'm sure four years ago,
I was saying all sorts of
crazy things about you.
And I was saying all
sorts of crazy things
about Rand Paul
and a bunch of people.
- And only half of that
were true.
- Exactly, but a bunch of,
but once you suddenly
look at the other side
and you go, holy cow,
these conservatives,
these libertarians,
they really just want
to get out of your way
in most respects.
Once you see that,
it's very welcoming.
So it's like,
I know we have
political disagreements.
We disagree on
abortion, for example.
And I'm more than happy to
talk about it if you want to,
but I know that you wanna live
in the same country as me
and the left has
created this odd thing
where if you don't agree
with them on everything,
you're out, man.
And I just don't wanna have
anything to do with it.
- Look, I get that.
And particularly in this time
and listen, in the age of Trump,
everything has gotten
personal and angry
and it's a morality play.
You have, we're so pulled apart.
But look, one of the differences
that I get really
frustrated with the left,
they are willing to
use government power
to impose their
worldview on everybody
and to punish anyone
who dares descent.
This is true in the
censorship world.
This is true..
It is, at the end of the
day, the lefter status.
They believe in
government power.
I'm someone who cares deeply
about the constitution
and bill of rights
and free speech.
And that means the
right of people
who disagree profoundly with me
to speak and engage
and I agree with
John Stuart Mill,
the cure for bad
speech is more speech.
So don't silence views
you disagree with.
Engage with them on the merits
and actually have ideally
a civil decent
respectful conversation.
And you're right,
immediately starting with,
if every conversation begins
with you're a Klansman,
that sort of dampens
the next step of
the conversation.
- Yeah, you don't get
much further than that.
I gotta show you.
I have a copy of "On
Liberty" in my nightstand.
So I'm with you on that.
- All right, I've gotta tell
you something very funny.
So you and I before the show,
were talking about
Houston Rockets
and I'm a die hard
Houston Rockets fan.
One of the stranger
things I own when I was,
I think I was in college
and I was on an airplane
and Hakeem Olajuwon.
Was on the airplane.
- I already loved this story,
wherever it goes.
- He was sitting
up in first class.
I was back in the cattle car.
He was up,
a time when I guess NBA players
didn't fly private everywhere,
but he was sitting there
and I was sort of starstruck.
And so I went up and
asked for his autograph,
but the only thing I had
is I was reading John
Stuart Mill's "On Liberty".
- That's incredible.
- And I had a red pen
that I was underlining it with.
So I'd got it home.
I'm not sure where
it is, which is,
but I have a Hakeem
Olajuwon number 34,
signed on the title page of
John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty".
- You literally have my whole
life in a book, basically.
That's absolutely incredible.
I told you that '95 Rockets team
is my favorite team of all time.
All right, so wait a second.
So let's push a little
further on this.
So because the left
wants to use state power
in a way that,
generally speaking,
the right doesn't want to,
or at least that
you don't want to,
if we're to go on this
dystopian future idea,
are you worried that
if these guys really take power,
I mean, they're going to start
jailing political opponents.
They are going to use,
we know they've
already used the IRS
to do all sorts of crazy things.
I mean, these are things
that are sort of
conspiracy theories.
And then, suddenly
at this point,
nothing feels like
a conspiracy theory.
- But it's all
justified in the end.
There's a self
righteousness to it.
We are right.
Anyone who disagrees is evil.
Therefore anything is justified
to suppress the evil.
You see that with cancel culture
where people go
like get driven out of
the public discourse.
Look, when I was,
in college, I was
a college debater.
Yes, I was one of the cool kids.
But, so I was in college.
I was the chairman of
the conservative group
in the debates society
and one of my closest friends
was the head of
the liberal group.
And we would have arguments
about free enterprise
and socialism,
like what works, what
actually benefits humanity.
And actually that question
is an important question.
Too often, people start
with the assumption
the other side wants
humanity to suffer.
If we start with the premise,
okay, most people of good will
would like people to be happier
and more well off
and more prosperous,
we start with that premise,
then we can have a
conversation about, okay,
what systems produce
more prosperity,
more opportunity.
It's,
couple of years ago,
I did three CNN town hall
debates with Bernie Sanders
and they were 90 minutes long.
And Bernie looked,
to Bernie's credit,
he's an unabashed socialist.
I disagree with him,
but he's honest.
And we can have a
conversation about socialism.
I think if you look
across the world,
it doesn't work.
It's produced misery,
poverty, suffering, death.
My family fled Cuba and
so I'm more than happy
to take the American
free enterprise system,
or as the left derisively
calls it, capitalism
and put it up next to
communism or socialism
or any dictatorship
they've implemented
in any country on earth.
And people are better off.
They have more opportunity.
And in particular,
there's the mobility.
You look at the
dystopian worlds,
one of the elements of it
is everyone is frozen
in their place.
Socialist countries,
communist countries.
There are rich people.
There are powerful people.
What you don't see
is new rich people.
What you don't see,
when my dad in 1957 was
a teenage kid from Cuba,
couldn't speak English,
washing dishes, making
50 cents an hour,
why did he come to America?
Because this is a country
where you could be a
teenage kid washing dishes
and climb that
socioeconomic ladder, and--
- Kind of worked
out for his kid.
- If someone had told
my father in 1957,
that 50 years in the future,
his son would be in the Senate,
that teenage immigrant
could never have believed it.
And that, but if we
can have conversations,
then we can say, all
right, what works?
What doesn't work?
The left is afraid to
have those conversations.
Their ideas don't work.
All right, there's a joke
that I tell sometimes,
which is how many
radical leftist
does it take to screw
in a light bulb.
- How many?
- That's not funny!
Come on guys, just relax,
like lighten up.
And,
I was talking about in college
when we were debating,
we'd go,
he called me a fascist,
I'd call him a communist
then we go get a beer.
Like just, not all
of life has to be,
I must destroy my enemy.
And there's a lot
of that right now.
- But do you think there's a
fundamental reason for that?
I think there actually is,
that lefties now and not always,
and I actually wanna ask you
about what it used to be like
when there was a sort of
sane Democratic Party.
But if there's a
fundamental reason
for the anger and the outrage
and the perpetual craziness
which is they believe
government is everything.
And that you know
this as a Senator,
it's a pretty freaking messy
probably often miserable
game that you have to play
to be a politician in America
or probably anywhere.
And that because
their whole world view
is through politics
as opposed to a religious
or some other
spiritual worldview
well, of course you're gonna
be endlessly miserable.
Do you think I'm
ball-parking something there?
- So I do.
And it's interesting.
I was talking the other
night to a gentleman,
he and his wife came from Cuba
and came from Cuba,
fled under Castro.
And he was talking
about, he said,
Ted, you talk about the
constitution quite a bit.
And he said, I think there
are a lot of people like me
who came from countries
where constitution
was meaningless.
And they don't
necessarily understand
why that matters.
And they're a little
bit skeptical of,
why should the constitution
make a difference?
And I was agreeing with him
in that we need to
explain that more,
government power,
the history of humanity
is largely a history
of government
oppressing the people.
Now you need some government,
I'm not an anarchist.
You need government
to protect your
fundamental rights
to life, to Liberty,
to property.
John Locke wrote about
the fundamental natural rights.
You need government
to impose rule of law.
And we see countries
that don't have that
are disasters,
but the more power
government has
the less liberty you have.
And Jefferson had a
great way of putting it.
He described the constitution
as chains to bind the
mischief of government.
- Yeah that's pretty profound.
- You look at the
first amendment,
free speech is not
about silencing
those who disagree with you.
Religious liberty.
It's not about forcing everyone
to practice your faith.
It's about saying,
look, it's up to you.
What faith you
practice or not at all.
That right of conscious
that you get to decide
that it's not government
that comes in,
you just heard,
all right, you talked
about abortion.
You and I may
disagree on abortion,
but you just heard
Joe Biden a week ago.
Say if he's elected,
he's coming after the
little sisters of the poor.
- No, I'm completely
against that, by the way.
I mean, I've done videos on it.
Yeah.
- I mean, that is
an extreme view.
You literally have
politicians saying
those damn Catholic nuns,
I'm gonna go after them
and force them
to pay for abortion
inducing drugs.
And these are nuns who
have taken vows of poverty
and are helping
the poor and the
sick and the needy.
And government now for years
has been persecuting them
because they must conform.
And it's just,
look, I think being libertarian,
live and let live,
giving people like
respecting diversity
solves a lot of the problems
we have in the country.
- So speaking of diversity then,
do you ever feel that
because you
mentioned your father
and your family's story,
because you're a Republican
because you're on the right,
that in many ways,
the people who love to scream
about diversity all day long,
they've sort of
stolen that from you.
I know you don't waive
it as a victim card,
but your own personal
family story.
And because you look
white, so to speak
and because you're on the right,
you're just a white guy.
Congratulations.
- Look, on social
media, it is amazing
you look at some of
the angry protesters
who sometimes are
angry rich white guys,
who are telling everyone look,
the riots that occurred
following the horrific
killing of George Floyd.
Many of the neighborhoods
that were burned down
were African American
neighborhoods.
Some of the most poignant
and powerful videos
were of residents there crying,
going, okay, you just burned
my only grocery store.
African American
small business owners,
whose stores were destroyed
and destroyed by
self-entitled often middle
or upper class kids.
Look, I grew up,
my mom is Irish and Italian
from a working class family.
She was supposed to
never go to college.
My dad, as I said, was an
immigrant with nothing.
When I was in high school,
my parents went bankrupt.
We had a small business.
It was the mid '80s, oil crash,
we lost everything.
We lost our home, we lost,
I mean, lost everything.
So I went to college at age 17.
My parents couldn't
pay any tuition.
I was on my own at 17.
and I'm grateful for a
country that let a kid.
Now, my parents gave me a home
with love and nurturing.
And so in that
respect, I was rich.
I was rich in terms of
having a mom and dad
who loved me and encouraged me.
But I was on my own.
And that's the beauty
of this country.
And
I think the single biggest lie
in all of politics
is that Republicans are
the party of the rich
and Democrats are the
party of the poor.
I think it's absolutely false.
If you look at Democrats today,
they are the party of
Silicon Valley billionaires.
They are the party of
Wall Street tycoons.
They are the party of
power and resources
and Republicans, the party
that I want to be a part of
is a blue collar party.
We're the party of
Ohio steelworkers,
we're the party of single
moms waiting tables
we're the party of teenage kids
like my dad washing dishes.
Why, because opportunity is why.
The ability of people
to have a job and
to work is powerful.
- Do you see that as
the ultimate irony
of what's happened
with Silicon Valley?
Is that I think privately,
I mean, I know a
lot of these guys,
privately they're libertarians,
of course they are because
they want to create,
they love competition
and they want to be taxed low
so that their
businesses can thrive.
And then publicly
what you see them say
is completely the reverse.
- Well, look, I mean,
silicone Valley is so bad
that, Peter Thiel.
Peter has been a buddy of mine
for 25 years.
- Yeah, we're friends too.
- Peter and I were friends
before he had made his money.
When Peter and I became friends,
it was the mid nineties
and he was a corporate
lawyer practicing law.
Silicon Valley is so bad
that Peter was driven out of it.
I mean, he's moved out to LA.
- To Los Angeles.
- Like it,
- You know something's wrong
when you're coming to LA
for a safe Haven from the left.
- And there's,
big tech is about power.
And it's also about
virtue signaling.
It's about showing
that you're morally
self-righteous.
And when they're driving someone
like Peter Thiel out saying,
you are a heretic
and it's on view
after view after view,
there is,
it's interesting,
it's a religious fervor.
It's become the new religion.
Wokeness is, and by the way,
no one can be too pure.
Like I mean,
there's an element of like
Robespierre setting up
the guillotine
where they will come after,
someone is only 99% woke.
Well, the 1% is
coming after them.
And that,
- Well we see that
with all these
Hollywood people, right?
Because no matter
how much they beg,
they think it's
gonna spare them,
but it's not gonna be the
angry Trump supporters
who come to burn
down their mansions.
It's gonna be these other guys,
no matter what pendants
you offer them,
but that's sort of gets back
to what I was asking you before
about, do you think that
because the worldview
is bereft of anything
other than politics,
that the hole it leaves
actually it leaves you with,
what people would say
is a God shaped hole
that there is no sort of
spiritual anything there.
So you become the very thing
that you hate in essence.
- Yeah, I'm not sure
big tech hates it
all that much.
So I actually think,
tech started out as...
And by the way,
my parents are
both mathematicians
and computer programmers.
So, I mean, I was raised
in a techie world.
Their small business
was a seismic data
processing company.
My parents were programming.
I mean, my mom started
as a programmer in 1956.
I mean, really the
dawn of computers.
I think tech started out,
you had people let's
say Mark Zuckerberg,
drops out of college,
goes and starts Facebook.
They are just trying
to build a business
and they're doing
their own thing.
And big tech didn't start
out all that political.
It was go, hey, play
foosball in the office
and wear shorts and flip flops
and go innovate
and be disruptive.
The whole disruptor thing
is a big part of the ethos.
And early on, I don't
see Silicon Valley
as deeply political.
It's more recently,
and its...
It's a clothing of protection.
For one thing,
these guys are the
modern day Robin Berets.
I mean the vast amount of wealth
as these plutocrats live in,
they're owning islands
and flying massive jets
and just--
- they've got walls
around those houses,
and security with guns,
it's all very confusing.
- And it all becomes just,
I actually don't think they
cared that much about this,
but they don't wanna
be rejected by the mob.
I think it's much more
a protective shield.
And
the world of social media
becomes self-reinforcing
where,
we used to have
homogenizing institutions
of whether it was
church or school
or the rotary club where
you might be a Democrat,
but you knew some Republicans,
you might be a Republican,
you knew some Democrats,
you might be Christian
or Jewish or Muslim,
but you knew people
of different faiths
and it was not...
On social media now,
anyone disagrees,
gets unfriended
and it becomes this echo chamber
where everyone
has the same view.
And when I look
at our democracy,
what I worry about
is there aren't
shared facts anymore.
We're not, the left is listening
to left-wing websites.
They're listening
to their own facts.
The right is listening
to right-wing websites.
By the way, look,
Fox is every bit
as one sided, as
biased as MSNBC is.
And neither one of them
are actually like having
an objective conversation.
I worry about what that's
doing to our country.
- Do you ever get
invited on MSNBC anymore.
- I haven't been in a while.
I mean, I've done
Chris Matthews,
- He's gone.
- He's gone.
They they drove him
out, you're right.
- So the last time
you were invited
by the guy who they took out.
- Last time I did it,
Chris Hayes interviewed me.
We did a thing called
The Texas Tribune
there was this space.
So I did an hour interview
and I agreed to that,
we actually had a good,
actually that was a good
substantive conversation.
It's about an hour long.
And it, he came at me
pretty hard, which is fine.
I mean that, if we're
having a conversation,
that's a step in
the right direction.
- So do you miss?
I mean, I think I
know the answer is,
but do you miss sort
of the same Blue Dog
more centrist Democrat
because I think Biden was
the last hope of that thing.
That's what it strikes me as
and clearly he's not
gonna be the savior,
obviously for many reasons,
but you know Jordan Peterson
talks about this a lot
that you want this
healthy tension
between the left and the right.
And it's like, look, I
know I'm new to the right
so maybe I don't see
some of the problems
that you guys had been
around, so you see,
but what I see is this
pretty diverse group
of the real Trump people,
the more libertarian people
that are all sort
of trying to fight
for what the future is.
On the left, I just see purging.
Do you miss the old school?
I know JFK is before your time,
but do you miss an
old school Democrat?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
- Yes.
Look, JFK is a great example.
Scoop Jackson on foreign policy
who believed in standing
up to communists.
You look at JFK,
I often quote JFK.
You read his speeches
for example, what he says
on religious liberty,
you read his speeches
on cutting taxes,
where he campaigned in 1960
on we're gonna cut your taxes
and we're gonna cut your taxes,
that's gonna produce more
jobs, more prosperity.
That's going to
benefit everyone.
Those speeches,
he would be driven out
of the Democratic Party,
like some crazy heretic today.
You look at the tax
cut we passed in 2017.
You know, how many Democrats
voted for it in the house?
Zero.
- Zero.
- In the Senate zero.
There was nobody.
I'll give you another example.
One that the media
refused to cover,
but it's one that I got
very passionate about.
The Democrats introduced
a constitutional
amendment in the Senate
to repeal the free
speech protections
of the first amendment.
Now this was following
the Citizens United case,
which Citizens United
become this totem.
So Hillary Clinton pled
every justice I appoint
is gonna repeal Citizens United.
Joe Biden said the same thing.
- Do they know
when they say that
about what the
Supreme court nominees
are gonna do in the future
that that's not really
how government works.
I mean, everyone does this
across the board, right?
- But what's interesting
for Democratic nominees
that largely does.
So I've got a book
that's coming out
in October called
"One Vote Away".
And it talks about how one
vote on the Supreme court
can change history.
And it goes through the
history on the left.
So on Citizens United,
Citizens United, by the way,
like a lot of people don't know
what the case was about.
It was about a movie maker
who made a movie critical
of Hillary Clinton
and the Obama administration
wanted to punish
the movie maker
for daring to criticize
Hillary Clinton.
And the Democrats introduced
a constitutional amendment.
The first version of the
constitutional amendment
would have given the
federal government
what's called plenary power.
Plenary is a legal term
that just means blanket,
broad, total.
- Yeah, the whole damn thing.
- Plenary power to regulate
any expenditure of money
for political speech.
That would mean
if a little old lady spent $5
on a poster board and a stick
and put it in her
front yard saying,
vote for Joe Biden or
vote for Donald Trump,
Congress could
make that a crime.
That would mean by the way,
Look, we're sitting
here in a room
where you've bought
this furniture.
You've got TV cameras there.
This is expending money.
That would mean
Congress could regulate
with total impunity.
So we debated it
extensively in the Senate.
I asked Democrats on
judiciary committee
three questions.
Should Congress be
able to ban movies?
Should Congress be
able to ban books?
And should Congress be
able to ban the NAACP?
NAACP is a corporation.
So their second version said,
we'll just give them total
power over corporations.
Well, corporations
aren't people.
They're collections of people.
My answer to those
three questions
are no, no and hell no.
When we voted on
it, do you know that
every single Democrat
in the Senate voted
to repeal the free
speech protections
of the first amendment?
I mean, liberals used to defend,
there's a famous case that
went to the Supreme court
where a guy wore
into a courthouse,
a jacket that said F the draft
although he didn't abbreviate it
and it went all the way
to the Supreme court
and the Supreme
court rightly upheld
his right to wear that.
And one of the justices said,
one man's obscenity is
another man's lyric.
There are none of those
liberals left in politics.
There are handful in the world,
but in politics,
they don't believe in
free speech anymore.
And that's scary.
- Can I give you the
Star Wars reference
that you can use for
this going forward,
it's order 66.
That's what the
progressives did.
They executed order
66 on the liberals
and they hunted them down.
And there's a couple
in hiding Bill Maher,
maybe three or four other guys,
what would have been
formerly me, I would say.
And that's kinda
where we're at now.
- You are right.
And look, Yoda escaped.
I liked that.
That has you hiding out,
but it,
there is a rabbit intolerance.
So the left demands conformity.
And you think about
it, socialism.
Socialism is about
the government being
in charge of everything.
That demands total conformity.
You take something
like federalism.
I'm a massive believer
in federalism.
We have 50 states.
Who would expect California
to adopt the same laws as Texas.
And that's okay.
Look, I,
that's why we have 50 states.
You can choose.
I think the laws of each state
should reflect the value.
So let's take something
like drug legalization.
So personally speaking,
I'm not in favor of
drug legalization,
but I think it's
a state question.
I think it's perfectly
fine for different states
to come to different
answers on it.
And then for there
to be a diversity
and to see what works.
The left doesn't
like that diversity.
And I'll give you an example.
Here's a question
very few people ask,
socialized medicine.
So it's become the new mantra
that everyone has to
support socialized medicine,
medical care for all.
There are 50 States
in the union.
How many have adopted
socialized medicine?
- Is it maybe three?
Is it zero?
Is it, what about Massachusetts?
Didn't they do something now?
- No, they did Romney care,
which was the
predecessor to Obamacare,
but let's take California.
California, there's a
Democratic governor,
a Democratic super majority
in the legislature.
They could adopt socialized
medicine tomorrow.
You know why they didn't?
Because they ran the numbers
and it'll bankrupt the state.
- Right.
Well, when Obama had a super
majority himself as president,
he didn't do it.
- Vermont, Bernie
Sander's home state,
they don't have
socialized medicine.
Here's part of the reason why?
If California adopted it
and there's nothing,
Republicans can't stop them.
It is the Democrats
who have decided
that we should not
have socialized
medicine in California.
And the reason is
the taxes they
would have to impose
would crush small
businesses even more.
It would cause them
to flee the state
to move to Texas.
So what does the left wanna do?
Here's our solution.
Let's impose it on the
whole damn country.
So you can't flee
unless you're willing
to go to New Zealand.
If you're gonna stay
in the United States,
there's no place to go.
My view, look
under the constitution
of California
on socialized medicine,
knock yourself out.
I think it's a bad policy,
but probably wrong.
Go show me that it works.
But it is the view,
everyone must conform
that it isn't truly dangerous.
- So you mentioned the
debates that you had
with Bernie Sanders,
the couple on CNN, I saw them.
And when people say to me,
well Dave, you seem so
different politically
than you did five years ago.
I always say the one thing
that I really did
shift on was economics.
So I'm way more right
Libertarian on economics.
Most of the other
things, actually,
I still believe I'm standing up
for my true liberal beliefs,
not the way liberalism
has been butchered now.
When you had those
debates with him,
do you think Bernie
now slightly regrets
what he has unleashed here?
Because I think
you could look at
the crazy Marxist lunacy
and the squad and
identity politics
and the hatred of America.
I mean, every Bernie
debate, what was it?
We're going to have a,
he kept saying
political revolution
'cause he knew if he
just said revolution,
that means heads on spikes,
which that's coming.
Give it a little while.
But do you think
he maybe regrets
some of what he has led to here?
Or do you think he's
just riding it out?
Now, I'm also, I will say
one of the things which is,
I'm a firm believer.
They will take him out too,
because eventually
he will just be
an old failed white guy
who played by the system.
Played by the rules.
- I don't think he regrets it.
So Bernie is a true believer
and I prefer honesty.
A lot of Democrats
for a long time pretended
they weren't socialists,
even though they've
voted like it.
Bernie's changed that party
and changed that
party dramatically.
And look,
I think Bernie is grumpy
that he's not the savior
that he wanted to be.
So look, a lot of
revolutionaries
in Cuba, Fidel Castro
was about Fidel Castro.
He wanted the power
to be the dictator.
I think Bernie is unhappy.
There's a particular
kind of bitterness.
You look at how Bernie deals
with say Elizabeth Warren,
who is a younger interloper.
And both of them look at AOC
and go, who the hell are you?
Now, they're all
on the same team,
but it's sort of...
- Except I don't think,
I agree he's a true believer,
but I don't think he had like
this sort of true
fundamental hatred
of all of our institutions,
AOC, Ilhan Omar, the others,
now again, I'm not saying
I'm totally right about this,
but I sense like a real,
like let's destroy the
whole damn thing with them.
Then I think Bernie
was the thing that allowed
it into the system.
- Well and you look
at, for example,
let's take statues that
are being torn down.
So the debate started
with Confederate statutes
and we can have a
conversation about that.
Look, I'm one that believes
we shouldn't erase history,
but I also believe slavery
is the original sin of America,
it is a grotesque evil.
And our nation fought
a bloody civil war
where 600,000 people
died to end slavery
and our journey to civil rights
has it been a long journey.
It's been an imperfect journey.
We continue on that journey.
But, but as Dr. Martin
Luther King said,
the arc of history
bends towards justice.
But it started out
as a discussion of
confederate monuments.
Then it became a discussion
of George Washington,
of Thomas Jefferson,
of James Madison.
It became people defacing
statues of Abraham Lincoln
and Ulysses S grant
because they were
such big Confederates.
- Frederick Douglas.
- So the ignorance of
it, Frederick Douglas,
like the angry mob at some point
when you're attacking
Washington and Lincoln
and Frederick Douglas,
It's not that you hate slavery.
It's not that you hate racism.
You hate America.
- But so what I'm
trying to figure out
that when I see
today's Democrats,
it's even, Pelosi
when she's now nodding to them
like, Oh, well, people
have grievances.
And it's like, I don't
think she believes it,
but she's just trying
not to get her
mansion burned down.
Do you think it's that bad?
It seems to me that's
obvious at this point.
- I think it is,
there's a video I saw on Twitter
of some college kids.
I think they were in New York
and there was a riot and...
- We are on your side
- We're on your side.
I mean, it was no, no,
no don't burn us down.
- Yeah, so they throw the rock
through their window
and they're supposedly
cheering them on
and it's like, nobody's
there's no side
because it's a...
- And you look at,
you look at the angry Marxists
who want to destroy
this country.
And I worry about our education
that people don't understand.
What we have in America
is unique in the
history of the world.
Most of history,
look free speech, free
speech doesn't exist
in many countries
on earth today.
And we're not training
our kids to know,
to understand the
degree to which,
they're just being told,
everything is
systematically racist.
We just had a debate
in the Senate
judiciary committee
where all these
Democrats are saying
nothing has changed
in the 50 years.
I'm like what?
Utter garbage,
nothing has changed.
We had Jim Crow laws.
We had segregated schools
with segregated water fountains.
You're saying the march in
Selma didn't do anything?
I mean, that is...
And the problem is it's a lie.
If people don't understand
the journey towards justice,
towards protecting
people's rights,
then they wanna
burn it all down,
which ends up hurting
everybody's rights.
- Okay, so the obvious
question there is,
are the two, as we watch now,
mainstream media burned down
and the institutions
burned down.
So you're a Harvard guy,
you're a Princeton guy.
These are institutions
that are on fire right now.
I would say rightfully so
the New York Times
rightfully so,
the 1619 project, let
this thing freaking burn.
The amount of hit pieces
that they've done on me
that they've done on
people in my circles
that I'm sure
they've done on you,
but are you worried that
if all of these liberal
in the right sense
of liberalism,
institutions burned down,
that we will have nothing
that will allow us
for national cohesion?
'Cause you sort of
hit on that earlier.
- Yeah, I'm deeply
worried about it.
They're no longer liberal
in any real sense of the word.
They're authoritarian.
The New York times
fired their editor
because he dared write an op-ed
from a US Senator.
- He didn't write it,
He just allowed it to--
- Published it.
He allowed it to be published.
We think about for a second,
And then look, I actually,
look the op-ed that Tom
Cotton wrote, it was okay.
I actually didn't agree
with a lot of stuff he said.
I thought it was a bit much.
But if you disagree with it,
write something
saying it's wrong.
Like, why are you,
part of it is a
testament of fear.
You don't believe
in your own ideas.
Free speech, and by the way,
you hear people in the
Senate all the time say,
well, speech that's offensive
shouldn't be allowed.
That's exactly
what the first
amendment is about.
You don't need the
first amendment
for speech that
everyone agrees with.
If the majority agrees with it,
you don't need the
first amendment
to protect your rights to say,
puppy dogs are nice.
That's like, at least right now,
nobody is stopping
the pro puppy dog...
- Patients, patients.
- Supreme Court in
another famous decision,
Skokie, Illinois,
the Nazis wanted to march.
Supreme Court rightly said,
you've got a right to march.
Now, by the way, when
it comes to Nazis,
I'm perfectly happy
to say they're evil,
ignorant, bigoted morons.
And I'm not scared
of them saying
whatever idiocy they
wanna say because,
now I think we have
a moral obligation
to engage in it, to
say why it's wrong,
but government
shouldn't silence them.
Why should we be afraid of
the Klan, the Klan are idiots?
And we need to demonstrate
why what they're
saying is wrong,
but inevitably
the mob calls everyone
a Nazi or Klansman
and they use it to
justify regulating,
J. K. Rowling now
can't say women exist.
That is deemed the
same as Adolf Hitler.
Okay, that's just a little nuts.
Like, we can have a
respectful civil conversation,
but you're right.
There are no
Walter Cronkite,
used to report,
and Ella Cronkite leaned left,
but not in a virulently
partisan way.
And some of it is the media.
Trump broke the media.
But like, they hate him so much.
There is no longer,
there used to be,
five years ago,
the media pretended
they were impartial.
Remember they would argue,
there is no bias in media.
Have you heard anyone
make that argument?
- Nobody says that anymore.
- Because it's so obvious
that they've decided we're not,
they no longer hold
out impartiality
as an objective to which
when the New York Times--
- Well, because
impartiality is now proof
that you're somehow racist
or something like that.
- The 1619 project,
- You're upholding the system.
Yeah.
Is a fundamentally
racist bigoted endeavor.
And the New York Times admits
to redefine history
and the real danger
of the 1619 project
is going to be all the
little tyranny of leftists
in the school boards
that begin teaching
it in schools.
This is propaganda that is
of Orwellian proportions.
- So Senator Cruz,
are you telling me
that the United States
didn't invent slavery?
We didn't invent slavery.
I mean, we also got rid
of it pretty quickly.
They don't really
wanna get that.
And it was going on
for thousands and
thousands of years
and it's still going on
in parts of the world.
Somehow that's inconvenient.
- And listen, the abolitionists.
So one of the rich ironies
is the Democrats who moralize
on questions of race.
The Democratic Party
is an absolute frigging
train wreck on race.
It was Democrats
who founded the KKK.
It was Democrats
who wrote Jim Crow.
It was Democrats who
implemented segregation.
The party I'm a member
of, the Republicans,
was founded to oppose slavery.
Abraham Lincoln was the
first Republican president.
The reason we were founded,
now here's the
Democratic narrative.
Well yes, that was true then.
Nathan Bedford Forrest,
who's the founder of the KKK,
was a delegate
to the Democratic National
Convention in 1860.
The, media narrative
is yes, that was then
but the Democrats changed.
Well, interesting,
Let's go to the civil
rights act of 1964,
a lot higher percentage of
Republicans supported that
than Democrats did.
It was the Dixiecrats.
Bull Connor was a Democrat.
The guys with the dogs
and the clubs beating the
civil rights protestors
without exception
were Democrats.
And they said, well, okay, fine.
That's true up to the sixties.
But magically, it changed.
Dave right now today,
as we sit here,
the sitting governor of Virginia
chose to put in his yearbook
a picture of a Klansman
and it may or may
not have been him.
- Yeah, may or may not.
- Now think of the pathology
of the media for a second.
So Ralph Northam was a Democrat.
He's an elected Democrat today.
Not 50 years ago,
not 100 years ago,
today in 2020,
he put in his yearbook,
a picture of one guy
dressed as a Klansman,
another guy in black face.
Now what an indictment
of the media
that everyone freaked
out about the black face.
Now look,
all right, I can
accept that black face.
I can understand why that
would be seen as disrespectful.
Like the media is a little
freaked out about it.
Like every late night comic
is dressed in black face.
And I don't think it
was a big deal in Texas.
I don't think I've
ever known anyone
who's dressed in black face.
It seems like in Virginia,
every elected politician
just about did it.
But it was weird
that between the two, they have
this hysterical fit
about the black face
and no one comments
about the Klan outfit
and Ralph Northam's comment
the day after it broke,
it was the most revealing.
It was before they had gotten
their talking points down.
He said,
he acknowledged that
he could have been
one of those two people.
And he didn't say which one.
If you're in elected office
and you cannot
say categorically,
I have never in my life
dressed as a Klansman.
You talk about cancel culture.
As far as I'm concerned,
if you don't know if
you've been a Klansman,
I'm more than prepared
to vote you out office.
- So is that Trump's
greatest skill
because you guys went at
it pretty hard in 2016
and now you've become one of,
I would say you're one
of his biggest allies
in the Senate,
but you guys were
going after each other
and said a lot of mean
stuff about each other
and all that.
But would you say
his greatest skill
is that, well, you
said it earlier
that he broke the media,
but that he broke the
inequity in the system.
The inequity in the system
meaning that culture
just teaches everybody,
you're a Republican,
you're a conservative,
you're on the right, you're bad.
You're a Democrat,
you're a lefty,
whatever, you're good.
And that Trump broke
the whole damn thing.
And that that is why
we're all kind of
crazy right now.
But in my view, at this point,
it was a necessary move.
- So yes, I think there
are a couple of things.
I think one,
- By the way, we've been talking
for almost an hour,
we've only said
Trump like twice.
I think we just said
some sort of record here.
That's pretty impressive.
- Look, I think 2016
was a giant screw
you to Washington.
I think working class voters
were fed up with Washington.
You want to understand
the 2016 election
it's blue collar workers
across the country.
There's a reason why in 2016,
Trump and I,
in almost every
state in the primary
either he was one and I was two
with blue collar voters,
or I was one and he was two.
And it's almost
perfectly correlated.
The states where I
was one and he was two
are the 12 states I won.
The states where he
was one and I was two
are the states he won
and no other Republican won
more than a single state.
It was a blue collar revolution.
- Who even won one besides--
- Kasich won Ohio,
- Oh, Kasich won Ohio.
- Rubio won Minnesota,
Trump and I won the other 48.
And by the way I remember
at the beginning,
there were 17 Republicans,
conventional wisdom.
If you were ranking those 17,
nobody in Washington or
New York would have said
Trump had a chance.
And no one said I had a chance.
We might have been 16 and 17
on the ordinal rankings
of who had a shot.
- And by the way,
you had men, women,
black people,
Latinos, white people,
the whole thing, what did
they have on the other side?
- I remember a
bunch of reporters,
it was in South Carolina
and I was doing a press gaggle.
And a bunch of reporters said,
what do you do about the fact
that Republicans are a
bunch of old white guys?
And I stopped and
just started laughing.
And I said, number one,
have you looked at
the Democratic field?
They're literally
septuagenarian socialists,
all of them.
Do you know how many Hispanics
have ever won a
presidential primary
in the Democratic Party?
- A presidential primary?
- Yeah.
- No, I'm guessing zero.
- A state, I'm talking about
a single state.
- Even a single state.
I'm gonna guess it's zero.
- Zero.
Julian Castro was
complaining that,
we shouldn't have Iowa voting
because no Hispanic can win.
Well, I put it out, look,
you look at the 2016 field,
we've got an African American
world famous neurosurgeon.
We've got a woman who was a CEO
of a fortune 50 company.
We've got two sons
of Cuban immigrants
who in their forties...
I mean, you wanna
talk about like,
but the press still described us
as old white guys
and the old white guys
who are socialists
at their Bolshevik
reunion as somehow,
Elizabeth Warren just just said,
we need new leaders.
Do you know Joe Biden,
do you know, when Joe Biden
was sworn into the senate?
- 37 Years ago, it's
a little bit crazy.
- 1973.
I was two when Joe Biden
took his oath of office.
- He's been presiding over
an awful lot of problems.
Do you find it hilarious then
when as the primary
was rolling out,
the Democratic primary,
that every time someone
that was a minority
or a perceived
minority dropped out.
They basically said
that their own party was racist.
They would say, well,
we're not diverse enough.
It's like, well, it's your base
that's voting you guys out.
You can't blame this,
but somehow the media spins it.
You suddenly like,
oh, I guess the
Republicans are racist.
- Facts don't matter
for their narrative.
It is a propaganda effort.
So I think the Trump
election in 2016
was number one, a screw
you to Washington.
Number two, it was
working class voters.
Under Obama, the Democratic
Party made a choice.
It was a very conscious choice
between two traditional
favored children
of the Democratic Party.
You were talking about
the old Democrat,
where there were
Blue Dog Democrats.
The Democrats made
a choice between
California environmentalist
billionaires
and the jobs of
labor union members.
Now look, the Democratic
Party used to be,
FDR used to be the working
man, the union party,
and under Obama,
the party decided
it wanted the money
from the top styers of the world
more than it wanted
the steel workers
and the truck drivers
in Pennsylvania
to have jobs.
And so they consciously,
and their view was
the union bosses will
deliver the votes,
those used to be
our foot soldiers.
We're gonna vote to shut
down the Keystone pipeline,
screw the jobs.
Okay, those guys don't get jobs
because it makes us feel better
as we are living in
multimillion dollar mansions,
and it doesn't affect our lives,
it makes us feel better
to give away their jobs.
I think the working class
war back at Washington
was a big part of 2016.
And I also think,
look, it's interesting though,
I don't think the phrase
cancel culture existed in 2016.
It was called political
correctness then.
But the fact that
Trump would say,
would stand up and speak out
and he'd go around
the gatekeepers,
it's why social media
has gotten more vigorous.
They're mad that anyone
got around the gatekeepers.
So they're trying to close off
the avenues of communication.
- Okay, so I know we're
crunched on time here,
and I wanna get a couple of
video game minutes in with you.
So we'll try to do this quick.
So do you think,
and I don't mean this
as a shot to you,
but do you think Trump,
the reason Trump won was because
he was willing to do stuff
that you would not have done.
Because I think there's
a sense of that.
Remember there was that moment
when Marco Rubio
tried it for a day,
there was literally that one--
- Yeah, and it didn't work.
- And it just blew
up in his face.
But do you think,
and maybe that's not
a shot to you or,
I don't know if it's
credit to Trump or just,
it had something to do
with how we're all wired
or something like that.
- So inauthenticity
doesn't work,
people can smell it
when you're a fake.
Trump won the primary in 2016
because the media
gave him $3 billion
in free media.
And it has no president in
the history of politics.
$3 billion in free media.
- But do you think
that was because
he was willing to do something?
Meaning just, blow up
part of the system.
- I actually think it was
fundamental corruption
on the part of the media.
So I think the mainstream media,
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC,
they all wanted Hillary to win
and they believed Trump
was the easiest candidate
for Hillary to beat.
And I think they made a
very conscious decision,
all Trump all the time,
because they wanted
Hillary to win.
I think they were corrupt.
I think that they had
that same corruption.
But the consequence,
I mean, we've had over
two centuries of politics
there's never been a candidate
worth three billion
dollars of free media.
It became a tsunami
that in the last 30 days,
there was $500
million of free media
and we couldn't
be heard anymore.
And I do think people were
fed up with Washington
and that's what 2016 was.
Was a statement about that.
- All right, So I said two more,
but I'm gonna throw
in one more extra.
So they still are two.
What do you make of
the never Trump crew?
Like this Lincoln project,
these people who are now
supporting all Democrats
and now we're talking about,
it's not just about
taking out Trump anymore.
Now it's we're gonna find
the congressional candidates
and the candidates
in the Senate.
What do you make of
these people who,
Trump, like him,
don't like them,
orange, big hair.
It's like, he's doing the things
that conservatives want done.
- So whatever anyone tells you,
it's not about the money.
It's about the money.
Look, these Lincoln project guys
are a bunch of
political operatives
who are making millions.
- Who also got everything
wrong always, forever.
Bill crystal.
- Look, they have been,
they've been operatives
for a long time.
So you want to look
at the pattern.
They've run a lot of
loosing presidential races.
Loosing to Democrats.
They're very good at
losing to Democrats.
In significant part,
you look at all of these guys,
so I think the real divide
we have is not racial.
It's socioeconomic.
It is the difference
between wealthy elites
and working class voters.
All of these so-called
anti-Trump folks
are the people
who've been saying,
screw you to the working
class voters for 20 years.
And they're still echoing that.
And by the way, I think now
they're just making a buck.
I mean they're printing money
to put money in their
own bank account.
And listen, when
it comes to Trump,
there are a lot of things
Trump says and does
I don't like.
I agree with many of the
policies he's implemented.
And I think he showed
a real backbone.
And the role I've tried to play
the last four years
is to encourage the president
to go on in a
positive direction.
To encourage him, let's
take social media.
This order, I had been
urging the administration
for three years for
them to do this.
So I'm glad they did it.
It took a lot of work
and I'm grateful.
I'm grateful,
as a president, I think
his best characteristic
is that he has a backbone.
He's willing to make decisions
that many Republicans
wouldn't make.
Things like moving our embassy
in Israel to Jerusalem.
I urged him to do that.
Both the State Department
and Defense Department
didn't want him to do that.
They argued against it.
His own State Department
and Defense Department.
- And every president had run on
saying they were gonna do it--
- Democrats and Republicans
have broken that promise
over and over again.
Pulling out of the
Iran nuclear deal.
Again, State and Defense
said, don't do it.
I urged him to do it, he did it.
Look that took balls.
I'm grateful for that.
Do I wish
he didn't send some
ridiculous tweets,
of course I do.
There are times when,
it ends up being
less effective, but
on Capitol Hill, the
reporters run to you
and they want a
comment on every tweet.
And I tell them, I said, look,
I have a rule of thumb.
I don't comment on tweets.
Cause I'm not interested
in playing media pundit
and responding to,
at 10:07 am the president
tweeted this at 10:09 am,
I don't need to do that.
You were talking
about substance,
let's talk about free speech.
Let's talk about
religious liberty.
Let's talk about the
second amendment.
Let's talk about
securing the border.
Let's talk about
rebuilding our military.
I'll talk about substance, but,
and I think that substance
we've gotten a lot done.
- All right, so now I
got one more for you.
We we did now 70 live minutes.
My guys are gonna shoot me.
And I know you got to get over
to PragerU after this,
we didn't talk
about COVID at all.
So if you could
just kind of couch,
like how you're
feeling we're doing
at this very moment,
the state's rights part of this.
And I guess most importantly,
this will be sort
of a good ending.
Do we ever get
out of this phase,
this thing that we're
all feeling right now,
between COVID,
between the protests,
between the oncoming election.
Do we ever get out of this thing
and back to something
that feels more normal
or is to bring it
back to Sci-fi,
are we heading to
a brave new world,
a dystopian future,
something like that?
- Yes, we'll come out of this.
- How about a question like that
when you only have like
three minutes left,
but you do what you gotta do.
- This actually connected
to where we started.
This is a good place to wrap up.
About how polarized
and tribalized we are.
One of the things I find bizarre
about this pandemic is
how people look at it
through a political lens.
It's all politics.
So, my view on the virus,
it's serious, it's deadly.
We need to take serious
steps to combat it.
And I've laid out a
whole series of steps
and been advocating for it.
Whether it's increased testing,
whether it's
investments in vaccines
and in treatments
that we need to use common sense
to stop the spread of the virus.
But at the same time,
people's jobs matter.
44 million people
losing their jobs,
that produces real suffering.
It produces death.
You need to talk
about mental illness
and depression, alcohol
and substance abuse,
destroying people's livelihoods
is a problem we need to balance.
And what's weird is
the idea of balance.
The idea of let's use
some common sense.
It feels kind of
lonely saying that
because, all right let's
take, for example masks.
Masks have become this
bizarre virtue signal.
So listen on the right
there's some people
like never wear a mask
no matter what!
And I'm like, okay, that
seems a little out there.
On the left, there
are Democrats who,
their social media
picture has a mask.
I remember one, Sherrod Brown,
Senator from Ohio
gave a floor speech
in the Senate a
couple of weeks ago.
He's wearing a mask
during the whole speaker,
no one is within 20 feet of him.
He's standing alone
on the Senate floor
with a mask
because it's a sign,
I am righteous.
I am wearing the clothes
of the high priest.
Now look, you and
I talked about it.
I've got my damn
mask in my pocket.
- It's a Houston Rockets mask.
- You didn't make up
the Olajuwon story.
- I believe in,
do things that are sensible
and use common sense but,
viewing it all through
a political lens.
By the way, I have a prediction.
If God forbid Biden wins,
the day after the election,
everything will be better.
The day after the election,
everyone will say,
go back to school.
Go back to work.
- Oh, the COVID,
the COVID level.
- The disease won't
suddenly get cured.
But everyone likes the people
who are saying shut it down.
There's a political urgency.
They want the great depression
because they want
to defeat Trump.
They won't even wait
until Biden is sworn in.
If Biden is elected that week,
they'll say, all right, everyone
needs to go back to work
and go back to school.
- So you believe
they're deliberately
tanking the economy.
I mean, I've tweeted
something to that effect.
I believe that Gavin
Newsom here in California
is trying to destroy the economy
so either the feds have
to bail us out or--
- They hate Trump so
much, it's all consuming.
And the angry left,
they've convinced themselves
that Donald Trump is Hitler.
So everything is justified
in terms of defeating Hitler.
And it's just like,
okay, that's...
And by the way, the answer,
the politicized
answer on either side,
shut everything down forever,
or everyone go back
to perfectly normal
and don't, pretend
there's no pandemic.
Neither one of those make
a lot of sense to me.
But listening to
medical professionals
and following common sense
and also respecting
people's jobs,
in the media world,
who's advocating that?
You don't get,
if you're not advocating
an extreme position,
it doesn't exist.
- Senator, I feel like
we just started here,
but it has been 80 minutes.
And you got a busy
day ahead of you,
but I promise.
- We gotta close
the way you started though
which is reminding people
to go subscribe to
the Verdict podcast,
either on the podcast,
- Oh you've really become
a podcaster now.
- Or on YouTube
give us a five star
rating, subscribe.
Look, Verdict
podcast, as you know,
we launched it
during impeachment.
It became the number
one podcast in the world
when we launched it.
And so come sign on.
And what we're doing every week
is having conversations,
trying to actually understand
what's going on in the world
and address real substance
and have fun too.
- And I'm pretty sure that
that Michael Knowles guys
is standing on the other
side of that door right now
'cause we're going
to do a little pickup
for Rubin Report.
It was a pleasure.
I hope you'll come back
to talk about your book
in October when it comes out.
- Excellent.
- And may the force be with you.
- Indeed.
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and thoughtful conversations
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