Behind the Bastards - Let's Talk About Dave Rubin

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss Dave Rubin.FOOTNOTES: https://twitter.com/nathanTbernard/status/997515380808650752 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiVQ8vrGA https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dave_Rubi https://www.businessinsider.com/dave-rubin-dont-burn-this-book-review-out-of-ideas-2020-4 https://medium.com/@oliverjia1014/the-trouble-with-dave-rubin-4388caed5898 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is that an introduction? I like it. Is that how a podcast starts? Okay, well, that's the introduction to the podcast. I liked the intro you did before we started recording better. Oh, when I said what, Sophie-ing my lichtermens? Yeah, because I'm obsessed with myself.

I know, but I can never do the same introduction twice. That's fair. So what does pretend it didn't happen? Legally. Legally, yeah. Legally. Legally. Legally.

Legally. Legally. Legally. That's part of my contract with the government. So this is Behind the Bastards podcast about the bad people in the world. And we're doing something a little bit different today. See, it's helpful in this show with all the breaking news that happens in the world and the fact that I sometimes go cover it live to have a little bit of a backlog built up,

gives us some flexibility, lets us do things. And we lost that backlog this summer because of all the riots that I had to attend. So we're trying to build that backlog back up. But I got to write like 20 pages a week just to keep moving. So we're working on some ways to get ahead a bit. And one of them is today's special episode. We're focusing on what I would call a little bee bastard, someone who would not be enough to get an episode of Behind the Bastards on his own,

but I do think is interesting in the way he's shitty. So I've written a short essay about him and then we're going to delve into his book. And to help me explore this particular little bee bastard, this special piece of crap, is Shereen Lanayutas. I'm back fam, I'm back. Come on Shereen, we're talking about David Rubin. Oh, thank you. Wow.

The last little bee I thought you would say, David Rubin. Should I know who? David Rubin. I think, I mean, I can... That's good. Stand by. Should I know who David Rubin is? No, you shouldn't.

You really shouldn't. He's very popular among people who are trash. Oh great, not very popular. He's like moderately popular because he hangs on to people who are very popular among people who are trash, but he himself is of it best modest notoriety. Now, he's been very successful at writing the coattails of some of the shittiest people in our discourse to modest success. Actually significant, like a lot of money, but that's part of the coattails.

He's a trash leech. A trash leech. Robert just stepped away, so it's my opportunity to say, off the top, I just want to get out of the way, but I don't know if I could top my last appearance. That was a trip for me. But I just really, really want to thank everyone that reached out to me via email, Twitter, Instagram. I read everything you wrote. I tried to respond to everyone that I could, but it really meant a lot to me.

And yeah, it was just really sweet and really affirmed that I should be vulnerable and normalizing. Talking about sex with sexuality is so important to me, and it's okay if I'm the vehicle for that sometimes. But yeah, I just wanted to say a really quick thank you to all the listeners that are listening now that maybe have reached out to me because your words really meant a lot. Thank you, listeners. It's so sweet to hear and very soulful, which is appropriate because the person we're talking about today doesn't have a soul. Not a single ounce of soul. Good to know.

Which makes you the perfect guest for this episode because you are full of soul and love and warmth. Thanks. I really feel dead inside most of the time, so that's nice that you have that impression of me. So, Shireen, you don't know David Rubin. He's like a YouTuber. He's a right-wing YouTuber. He gets a lot of Coke money, and he's pretty trashed. So we're going to read a little essay about Mr. Rubin, and then we're going to read from his book.

Oh, I can't wait. Oh, you're going to love it, Shireen. It's called Don't Burn This Book, which is, I think, a pretty sad attempt to make people, like, to act as if there's anything actually... Right. ...disruptive in there, as opposed to just being another cash grab by a guy whose basic modus operandi is to support the Republican Party. So, David Joshua Rubin was born on June 26, 1976. Obviously, since this isn't a standard episode, I'm not writing 10 pages on this guy, but we do have to get some context of his career, because it's interesting, and he's emblematic of a species of grifter.

He grew up in what he called a fairly secular household in Long Island. He came of age in Siasset, New York, or Siasset. I don't know how you fucking east coast. Fucking hate that whole fucking coast, Shireen. It's S-Y-O-S-S-E-T, New York. He grew up there. He got a bachelor's degree in political silence at Binghamton University, and despite a complete lack of talent and charisma, Dave decided that he was going to be a stand-up comedian.

So Dave decided that, like, he was going to be a stand-up comedian, and he had no talent in comedy, no ability to really work a crowd. But he decided to give it a shot anyway. So he started rampaging through a bunch of open mics in New York. Most of his jokes centered around the fact that he was a gay man and isn't that funny. Like, that kind of comedy. I've never heard that before. Yeah, in the early aughts, he was one of the hosts of a podcast called Hot Gay Comics,

which I'm sure was very high-brow. I love when people make their sexuality their entire personality. Yeah, I'm gay and I do comedy. That's the joke. Yeah. He made a public access fake news program, like a parody of a news show in around 2000, and he co-founded a couple of comedy clubs. His career in standoff never really took off.

He had a certain level of prominence, like, within a certain community, but it was not the kind of thing he was ever going to make a good living at, which is why he quit in 2007. And I think looking at a few clips of him being a comedian, it's very clear why his career didn't take off, because he's very, very bad. He's a void of charisma, and I'm going to send you a link here. I was just going to say, I love that you put yourself through that,

but now you're putting me through that. Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Never mind. Thankfully, this is from a tweet by Nathan Robinson. I'm not sure if he's the person who collected the videos or not, but somebody took clips from a bunch of his different stand-ups over, I think it was probably over a couple of years. And so we just have him, like, a few different punchlines of his

so we can see how the crowd reacts to Dave Rubin. Lesbians love Amstel. What is that? What is it? It tastes like water. Is there anything hotter than a lesbian spitting Amstel light all over herself? This has become very uncomfortable. And you, I think you're gay.

Am I right? No? Really? Mormon? You raised your hand. Does anyone need their genitals warmed up? That is our show. Did you guys have fun?

Does anyone need their genitals warmed up? Yeah. That's a joke. Get it? Because he's not straight. So that's the joke. I did post, this is pretty funny, but I did post this image the other day that has this wound on someone's arm and it says white guilt.

And then there's a bandage. Come and go over it that says queerness. And I do think some people use their sexuality and or queerness. This is coming from a queer person. White people use their queerness sometimes as a way to skirt around the fact that they're problematic and that gives them this like leeway to say whatever they want when really it doesn't do that at all. If that makes sense.

I'm like summarizing that meme in a very roundabout way. But weaponizing your sexuality is never really to disparage someone else is never really advised in my opinion. Yeah. And I don't think he was meaning to be disparaging at this point. I think it was just a matter of like, he's not a very good comedian. And so like, you know, this was the early oz early 2000s. That was sort of like, like you watch a lot of TV shows that had like gay

characters in them and like the joke was that they were gay, but it wasn't like they weren't trying to be mean. It was like attempting like there's a Simpsons episode that won an award for gay representation that is cringey to watch these days. But like at the time they're like, oh my God, the gay people in the show aren't monsters. So I think he was kind of writing that wave, which didn't last long because people were like, oh, what do we just treated everybody like people

and like didn't, you know, and Dave, he was reaching for material and he couldn't reach very far. No. And yeah, you can see there like he can't work a crowd. He has no charisma. People don't like him when he does like a live show. And this made, you know, a career in live performances less than an ideal professional route for Dave.

But he did have some talents. You know, he was good at organizing things. He put together some comedy clubs. You know, he was, I assume his show was funny enough that it earned him some like the local access show that it earned him some attention and he got an internship with the Daily Show's John Stuart. What? Yeah.

This is like early on like when John Stuart is like kind of having his big rise to prominence, you know. So Ruben does that for a little while. And I think it eventually leads him to get hired by the Young Turks Network and it moves to California and stuff. And the Young Turks is like a, yeah. So like we'll talk about them in a second. But yeah, so he gets his own show, the Ruben Report on the Young Turks Network

back in 2013. But both John Stuart and the Young Turks, it's pretty left, you know. Yeah. And he's left at this point. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

He's, he's, he's at least masquerading as a progressive at this point. He's 37 years old when he gets his show with the Young Turks. And that's kind of his big break. Now the Young Turks are a progressive left-wing news network, unadvisedly named after the architects of the Armenian Genocide for reasons too complicated to explain here. The network's number one claim to fame was providing the launch pad for the career of one of my favorite journalists,

Ken Clippenstein, who's pretty fucking cool. We love him. Yeah. He's the best. The best Twitter follow you could ever hope for. Yeah. He fucking rules. So for a while, like that's kind of like, it's a pretty, you know,

progressive network, not hard left, but not Democrat, like kind of soft left, like Sanders-y is kind of where we'd say it. And for a while, David's show was pretty standard, like soft left-wing fare. I'm going to quote from rational wiki here, kind of summarizing the stuff that he got up to on his and the Reuben report in its Young Turks days. He publicly criticized National Rifle Association commercials, trying to incite the fear of consequences of gun reform laws being planned

to be passed by the United States Congress, addressed a decision by McDonald's to remove healthier foods from its menu in a critical manner. On a 2014 episode of the Young Turks, he rebuked self-regulation in the economy and claimed that it has never worked, and he was supportive of single-payer health insurance. So.

Okay. Yeah, he's fine. Like, right? He's like a pretty normal, like kind of lefty Democrat. Nothing too outrageous. There were, however, some early signs that something might be a little odd with Dave. In 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza,

they had their war in Gaza in 2014, the Young Turks did like a 40-minute sort of like episode roundtable where they all kind of talked about what was happening. And Dave got into fights with absolutely everybody, by kind of like, not kind of, by repeatedly defending Israel's behavior in the war. And in subsequent shows, he repeatedly denied like war crimes that had been committed by Israel.

He showed up on like a radical atheist kind of podcast to express a bunch of like, like pretty much outright lies about Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause. So like, there were some signs like, okay, Dave's something's going on with Reuben here. Something a little bit not, not the standard for the milieu he occupies.

As I'm wearing my Palestine shirt. Yep. Yeah, Palestine isn't free. Yeah. And neither is my time, Dave. Sorry about wearing it. Oh, that's nice. That's the lower part.

Palestine is free and neither is my time. That's funny. Thank you. So Dave, yeah, it's a little bit odd. And he keeps getting into arguments with other folks at the Young Turks, particularly the founder of the network, Shank Wieger. And this is probably more or less like why he winds up

leaving the Young Turks network. He and Shank had an escalating series of disagreements that started with Reuben's comments about Palestine. Reuben himself would later claim that he grew apart from the left because of its obsession with identity politics, hostility towards free speech, and unwillingness to debate openly. He now has a completely different story for why he left the left.

But, you know, that's, as we'll cover, that's the main reason that he's prominent now is that he used to be on the left and he gives a bunch of lectures on why he left. So that's kind of the whole, he's just monetized that very effectively. So the Young Turks allowed Reuben to take his show and its YouTube account with him.

He bounced around from company to company, including Aura TV, which was founded by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and Larry King. That didn't work out, and Reuben went through a number of different hosts and networks over the course of about a year from 2014 until 2016, which suggests he might have been kind of a pain in the ass to work with.

In 2016, the Reuben report went independent and Dave Reuben finally found the thing he was good at. See, 2016 is like the easiest possible year you could have picked to get into the business of making right-wing propaganda on YouTube. The mix of prevailing political wins and Google's algorithm meant that even an idiot could make money spreading quasi-fascist propaganda for a while. And Dave, unfortunately, was not a total idiot.

In a move that showed just how savvy he could be, he pivoted his show to almost exclusively hosting guests who were members of what would come to be called the Intellectual Dark Web. You remember that? That thing? Yeah. Yeah.

So he sees that all these guys, these kind of regressive right-wing thinkers are rapidly gaining in popularity thanks to a mix of Google's algorithm and just sort of the political... So he starts having all these dudes on his show as they're rising, which, number one, builds a relationship with them so that they keep showing up even as they get big,

and it kind of allows him to siphon off from their fan bases and build a large fan base of his own. And this is a very effective tactic. He starts interfacing more directly with other chunks of the right-wing information sphere, including Prager University, where he stars in a viral video called Why I Left the Left.

And I'm going to send you this clip. You're going to start it at three minutes and 29 seconds, and you're going to run it to four minutes and three seconds. Okay. Lucky me. I know. You're going to really be happy today. I will say, the minute you look him up on Google,

his face... Well, I know I say this maybe every time, but a very punchable face. A very, very punchable face. If you look up punchable face, that's what comes up. For these reasons, I can no longer call myself a progressive. I don't really call myself a Democrat either. I'm a classical liberal, a free thinker,

and as much as I don't like to admit it, defending my liberal values has suddenly become a conservative position. So if you think people should be able to say what they think without being punished for it, that people should be judged by their behavior, not their skin color, and that people should be able to live the way

that they want to live without government interference, then there's not much left on the left for you. Yeah, yeah, you get the idea. Yeah, that's the way he... And the video is very successful. I don't know how many views does that fucker have right now, Shareen? Oh my God, it has over 14 million views and 212,000 likes,

and that is way too many. All this together with having people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and the IDW intellectual dark web crowd on his show, over the course of 2016, builds a huge brand for David Rubin. And again, the appeal is not Rubin himself, although I think he probably thinks that it is.

The appeal is that he has all these people who are really popular on and controversial, and he's willing to have conversations with all of these people. And he consistently refuses to identify as right wing. As he said in the video, he calls himself a classical liberal. He endorses a libertarian, not Trump in 2016. But in spite of this, he repeatedly agrees

with far-right talking points, even endorsing banning Muslims from entering the United States. He has people like Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos on his show, and Lauren Southern, who went on his show and defended Richard Spencer while he goes, mm-hmm, uh-huh, yeah. I hate Milo so much.

Yeah. His episodes with these out-and-out fascists like Milo were ostensibly the civil debates that he claimed that he loved, but he never actually pushed back against any of these right wing folks, like never. So they're not really debates. They're just him platforming and agreeing with terrible people, because he's terrible.

Even when like Ben Shapiro, his quote-unquote friend, expressed the opinion that Ruben's very marriage is itself a moral, because Ben Shapiro doesn't think gay people should get married, Ruben's like doesn't... None of this provides any conflict for Dave Ruben, because as will become increasingly clear, he's never believed in a single thing in his entire life, other than Dave Ruben being famous and rich.

I mean, that's a huge... That's a great point. It's never about the platform or the politics or anything, and it's all about ego. It's not about anything but ego, and he's just doing everything he can possibly do to inflate his ego, and it's not about...

It's not about standing up for anyone but himself. I mean, not even that. He doesn't even stand up for his own marriage. I wonder what his fucking husband thought about that. He talks about how disagreements with Cenk are why he left the Young Turks, but also like the Young Turks were never going to make him rich. I think they pay a living wage, and I'm sure he got a living wage,

working for those folks. I mean, maybe Cenk has, but you're not going to get rich doing that gig. You can get rich, especially in 2016, being a far-right YouTube grifter. I mean, the other thing about the Young Turks is that he would never be the main character. He wants to be front and center, spotlight.

He is not... Because it's about his ego, it's not about anything else. And the sad thing is, he's still not the main character, because he only has gained success by attaching himself lamprey-like to more successful grifters. I'm going to quote from Business Insider here. Defended Richard Spencer's white nationalism

is distinct from white supremacism, whom Ruben later called fearless, were met with no pushback at all when making egregious statements on the Ruben report. Oh, my God. Wow, wow, wow. Wait, can you... That was too much.

My brain can't handle all of that. Yeah, it's a lot, right? He's a piece of shit. He's just garbage. Do you want to think about what you want to say while we take a quick... You know who's not garbage. You know who won't platform Lauren Southern?

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. The products and services who support this podcast. Wow. No way. Nice segue. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside

an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, scar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What I do not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person

to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, was living in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending

the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

Apple Podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize

that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Oh, fun.

I'm so happy to be here. Got a little bit of good news before we dive back into Dave Rubin. Please. Harvey Weinstein's lawyer just said that if not released, he'll die in prison. Oh, that's nice. With a picture of him on a walker,

which is like, okay. You're threatening me with a good time, bro. Oh, man. I actually hate the idea of incarceration effectively used as a death penalty, but also, I'm not going to

use any of my fucks that I have to give on fucking Harvey Weinstein right now. You know what, I'll promise, for the sake of intellectual consistency, there are 30 or 40,000 more pressing problems. I will care about that injustice.

Yeah, sure. Down the line, maybe. Yeah, sure, whatever. We take care of a few 10,000 problems, deal with climate change, stop the rise of fascism, reform the criminal justice systems that black men stop getting murdered by cops,

and indigenous people stop getting murdered by cops. In the war on drugs, released everybody with a drug-related conviction. We get all that done. Then maybe. Yeah, we should make sure Harvey dies in a two-bedroom apartment that is comfortable.

It also keeps him isolated from the rest of humanity rather than locking him in a torturous cell. I'll get on board that. I don't know. I think I would still... We might disagree on this. I think he maybe should die. I think you...

I don't know. Can he die in prison? But I will have a long argument with you about whether or not he should die in prison while he's dying in prison. And then if he happens to die in prison while we're trying to come to an accord... Oh, that's a good point.

Okay, wait. I see my initial... My anger got the better of me. But yeah, you're right. I think you're completely right. I think justice needs to be served in a better way than just him disintegrating in a prison cell.

Yeah, I think he and... Paul Manafort. I think he and Paul Manafort should have to inhabit a small apartment in Whiskeygan and pick citrus all day. Oh, my God. Why see the Manafort roommates? I would watch that reality show.

And they can be the only ones picking citrus on whatever farm they're on because neither of them can be allowed to talk to people other than each other. Two old monsters grifting each other making lemons all day. Getting heat stroke. That's kind of entertaining to think about.

It is fun. Okay, so we're back to Dave Rubin. Dave Rub... Drewb... So yeah, I'm going to quote here from his write-up in Rational Weekly about how all of his positions changed as soon as it became very profitable

to be a right-wing grifter. Of course. Rubin reversed his earlier stance in the 18 episode of the Joe Rogan show that he wanted major deregulation and greater self-regulation, after saying it never works. In addition, he's shown an ever-expanding devotion

to bringing in controversial right-wing figures, including those with sympathies to causes of objectivist-style libertarianism and people with far-right views on topics on his show in the name of free speech. One such figure is Stefan Molyneux, known for both objectivist stances as well as reactionary attitudes to women's rights,

given his openly negative view of women in the show. When he does invite guests on the left now, it's usually only to complain about regressivism, which is his favorite word, that the left is regressive, which he, you know, fights against by partnering with people on the regressive right,

I guess. So Rubin's pivot has made him into a wealthy man. His YouTube channel has well over 2 million subscribers. Again, he works for one of the foundations or whatnot that he gets funding from, is funded itself by the Koch brothers. Really shady thing. Yeah, he gets Koch money.

As of 2019, he's hosted by Glenn Beck's The Blaze Network and all of this has made him a very wealthy man. He bought a $5 million house in the Hollywood Hills, like a year or so ago. Oh, fuck you dude. Very recently. Yeah, all of this has caused Anna Kasparian, his former colleague

and friend at the Young Turks, to call him a lazy fraud who wanted, quote, to make a six-figure salary to host a 30-minute a week show despite herself and her colleagues working 12-hour days for far less. She reiterated that he's sold out to corporate America by pointing out he's received money from the Koch brothers and alleges that he has no true political identity.

He's not an honest actor nor an intellectual, just a fraud, plain and simple. I like her. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. She was his friend, which has to be a bummer when your friend sells you out. Yeah, it's weird to work with someone on a very left-wing platform

and then suddenly see them swap over to the other side simply because it's more lucrative and, I don't know, attention-gravy, because then it just proves they were never about any type of cause. Like, she's right. He doesn't have any political

opinions. He's just a attention whore. And that reminds me to throw in a plug for my new nightly show on Fox News. Robert Evans left bad, which I will be recording from the private island

that I bought with my signing bonus. Evan's left bad. Yeah, that's what I was expecting to come up with. Left-wing bad over and over again and playing clips of Antifa looking scary. I think you can come up with something better. I've made $70 million already.

No. The key is you don't think about it at all. Evan's left bad. I hate it so much. If you're going to be a right-wing grifter, you can't think at all about what you're doing. You just grift. I mean, I speak for the listeners. We expect

better. You're not my listeners anymore. A bunch of frightened elderly people watching Fox News are going to be my listeners now. And all I have to tell them is that the left-wing is bad. Why would it not be behind the left bastards?

That's too complicated a title. Way too complicated a title. Robert Evans left bad. I'm just going to think the right-wing. How about left equals bad? That's the middle. It's getting worse. It's getting worse.

It is getting worse. There are, thankfully, some signs that Dave's ride to the top may be nearing an end. Much of his fame and his fan base were developed due to his close relationship to members of the intellectual dark web. He was often seen as the group's hype man. In fact, he acted as the hype man for Jordan Peterson

during the professor's world tour after the release of his book 12 Rules for Life, like he would introduce him at shows and stuff. This gets worse and worse. Terrible, terrible sets. But in recent months, the intellectual dark web has kind of faded into a subcultural memory. We don't talk so much about those guys

these days. They've become less relevant. Why is that? How have they made that possible? How have they made themselves truly fade away into the background while still existing? The intellectual dark web's whole goal was to kind of provide, do you know what parachuting is?

Remind me. Well, there's a couple of ways to do it, but one of them is you put like a bunch of drugs that you're going to take and like a little packet of something and swallow it so that it dissolves slowly in your stomach. And it's kind of a way to avoid the nasty flavor and to get maybe

a longer high. Let's parachuting. Can you repeat that? I'm going to take some notes. Okay. Yeah. So, like the intellectual dark web, we're kind of parachuting fascism into our culture by like wrapping it up in

like just asking questions and the other kind of shit. But they did it. But they did it. They did it and now they're not as relevant anymore. But that's what they wanted. In a way, isn't that what they wanted? I think they just

wanted to be famous and prominent intellectuals. But the problem is that now it's moved beyond them and the right is represented by a mix of the president and a bunch of gun toting howling violent fascists and

people like Ben Shapiro don't have nearly as much cultural like cachet as they used to have because things have moved far beyond them and things have moved far beyond guys like obviously Ruben's biggest break was his friendship and his relationship to Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson's brain

melted this year and his daughter first subjected him to experimental Russian drug addiction therapy and then gave him COVID. So he's not someone that Dave can cash in on anymore. Who knew that an all meat diet would do something to your body

alone? I don't even know if that's what did it. It's just in general, yeah. Dave Ruben also had kind of failed during his maximum period of expansion to really have any actual like a bunch of left-wing folks kept asking him to debate and he would never say yes

and he would actually regularly block them when they argued with him because he actually hates debate. So he's kind of locked himself into this position where the acceptable ideological spectrum of discussion in his show gets narrower and narrower every day and he can't really bring in new blood

and the thing that he what was once a fertile field for a guy like him which is kind of like I hate the left now, I'm not a right winger, I'm a classical liberal like listen to me as things have gotten more polarized nobody cares a shit about that anymore

or at least people give less shits about it than they used to and I actually found a write-up in medium from one of his former fans who is still really a big fan of guys like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson but who has gotten bored with Dave Ruben lately and I want to end

this chunk of the episode with a quote on from that. I say this as someone who genuinely admires people like Sam Harris and even what conservatives like Ben Shapiro have to say that Ruben Report is only concerned with the same handful of repetitive topics. Criticism of social justice warriors, political correctness

and student coddling on university campuses is all well and good but it has reached the point of ad nauseam with Dave Ruben. I would further argue that outside of niche internet political circles the vast majority of people in daily life are hardly concerned with these subjects to begin with. After the eighth or ninth softball question interview with a right-leaning guest on dunking

on blue-haired gender studies majors working at Starbucks and other blasé conservative talking points I eventually decided that listening to David Ruben Report every week was hardly the best use of my time and this dude who's a fan of his got blocked by Dave for like arguing very politely with him on Twitter because again Dave's little

fragile little baby. Well, fragile man ego. So that's a little overview of Dave Ruben. Dave Ruben. What? Is it time to make fun of him now?

It is. It's time to look into his terrible book Don't Burn This Book. It's like reverse psychology because now all I want to do is burn his book. Oh see, I don't care about his book that much. But I also just like to burn things. Maybe I should preface

that. I like to burn things. Yeah, I do enjoy a good fire. And the book is like, the cover is Don't Burn This Book in big letters subheading thinking for yourself in an age of unreason and there's a big match on the book. And we're going to do the thing we always do

where we buy the book and then refund it as soon as we finish here. I'm surprised his face is on the cover. Yeah, so am I. It has like a jacket quote from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson which I guess must be one of the last things Dr. Jordan B. Peterson did before his

brain melted down. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, so there's a fun quote in here from, yeah, his publisher writes that in a time of madness, the book will give you the tools you need to think for yourself which is very funny

for Dave Rubin to say. The tools you need to think for yourself. He's never thought a single thought. No, he just lets other people spew their thought vomit out on his show and then he nods unless they're on the left. He's a mouthpiece for literal garbage. He disagrees shallowly. Yeah,

yeah, and a representative passage from the book before we get into it reads, I want you to get into a bar and order a full-bodied opinion. I want you to get absolutely wasted on facts until 3 a.m. and then when you're just about ready to pass out, I want you to get another glass of reality and chug it. See how funny that is? The comedy?

Wow, he's like reading, he's drinking. He just loves metaphors and really drunk on knowledge. Wow. Yeah, and it's not even like the funny version of that. Like you could do a funny version of that where it's like, I want people to be well informed. I want people to get wasted on the facts. I want you to be shitting on

the floor of your aunt's apartment with knowledge. Yeah, exactly. But Dave, I'm sure when he read that back, he was like, fuck yeah, man. Yeah, I'm comedy. Yeah. I'm a genius. Yeah, it's, I don't know,

like it's, he's bad. Anyway, let's look into his book. Shall we? I actually want to start by reading. So I told you, he's given a couple different versions of the story of like why he finally left the left and you know, it started with his, like the, what seems to be the facts is that he had a

bunch of disagreements with Jacques about his support of Israel over Palestine and like that led to other disagreements and he was just kind of a pain in the ass to work with. But in his book, Ruben gives a very different story and he claims that like his, his break with the left started in 2016, which we know it happened

much earlier, but this makes it is kind of a better story. And it was during an interview with Larry Elder, who is a conservative talk radio, a black conservative guy and a very experienced talk radio guy. And Ruben used the phrase systemic racism and Elder challenged him and rally

it off. You know, he did the thing that like you can do if, to people who aren't good at debating about something like this and like give off anecdotes about individual incidents of police brutality that were misreported or talk about black on black crime, which ignores the fact that white people

commit the most crimes against white people and ignores the fact that like, no, there's a bit of like, well, yes, there are misreported cases of police brutality. There's a lot of documentation about like because Ruben doesn't do research because he's dumb or at least because he's a bad researcher or at least because

he's dishonest. He had nothing like he had nothing to say against this or anything like that. Yeah. And so he claims that like this interview with Elder is what changed his, his, his opinion, which is like why it's a smart move for him to try to pull, I guess

he did it a little bit late, but like he has to kind of rewrite that history because 2016 is such an inflection point politically and because this way he can, he can claim that like, no, it was like a conservative black man who like pulled me a gay man away from the left. Well, okay, but that's

the thing. So I wanted to, I wanted to clarify something that I said up top about white guilt and queerness because this is perfectly proves my point is that when some people that are already marginalized, like if you're a white gay man, like you can argue that you're already

marginalized. And so you don't have to examine how your whiteness is still problematic. And so I'm sure, I'm sure there's an element of that as far as kind of using a black man to like prove his point, like like, like, like help his story along

because like in his mind, like I'm I'm also marginalized. Like I'm not, I'm not like other white people. Like I understand. So I don't know if that makes sense. Is that kind of? Yeah, it does. And he definitely does

this thing where like he, one of the things he rails against the most in his show is identity politics. But he also focuses on like, well, I'm a gay man and I think that the left is crazy. Yeah, exactly. He uses it to only prove backwards points when really he's

not, he's using it as a crutch to not examine how his whiteness is like a huge point of his privilege. Yes. Yeah. And especially because he is able to pass as like, presumed

like he's not someone that would get ostracized in society by looking at him kind of thing. And so I think there's also privilege in passing. And I think he really uses his sexuality as the worst kind of

weapon against actual marginalized people, which is so upsetting. And it's so upsetting for the gay community in general, because I don't know. Just that kind of that brand of whiteness

is really upsetting to me. Yeah, it's very frustrating, all of it's very frustrating in the way in which he kind of caches in on him. Look, a black man agrees with me about the left. Exactly. Is very gross. And his book is very silly.

So I'm going to read from kind of the end of the introduction here where he lists first off the greatest contemporary thinkers in the world, which includes Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Dennis Prager, Brett Weinstein, Ayan Hirsi Ali,

Christina Hoff Summers who did a documentary about the men's movement. And of course, Peter Teal. Wow. Famed greatest intellectual in the world, Peter Teal. Wow.

I mean, I guess we know where some of that money's coming from, huh? It's like he's writing a parody. Yeah, he is like a parody. Everyone who tries to be an intellectual on the far right is like a parody of a smart guy. Really? Yeah. They too came out of the political closet

and helped me to see that tribalism is dead and that diversity of thought is far more important than diversity for its own sake. We need diversity of thought. We don't care. It doesn't matter if everybody's white. As long as they think different things, we can have a... God damn it.

Wow. Oh my god. Yeah. That's like one step away from like, I don't see color, but there's like a different... That's what he's saying. Yeah. He brands his book as a 10 step guide to political authenticity and promises in it, you'll learn how to embrace your

wake up call. It's the catalyst that brought you to these pages in the first place. Think freely or die. You'll get a much needed crash course and classically liberal principles that stand the test of time. Yada, yada, yada, yada. And then... Then freely or die. Stop worrying about whether you're a Nazi.

Oh my god. No, you're joking. That is not real. No. No. Stop. That is a fucking... That is a joke. That is truly... If I was writing a parody book about some right wing nut that wrote a book about...

Oh my god. Stop worrying if you're... No. Yeah. Stop worrying about being a Nazi. Because that's clearly... If you keep getting called a Nazi, don't analyze whether or not you're doing Nazi shit. Just accept

that like... It means nothing to be called a Nazi. You shouldn't even consider for a second. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry if someone calls you a racist. You're fine. Don't worry if you... You're fine. Yeah. Oh my god. Dave Rubin have declared you fine.

Check your facts, not your privilege. Please don't tell me this book did well. If this book did well, I'm truly signing off. I don't know. I think it did okay. I don't think it was like a giant national bestseller. Let's see here.

You can probably pull that up pretty fast. Oh, it's new. It's like brand new. I didn't realize it was 2020. It was like universally politically panned. I didn't realize it was 2020. The progressive woke machine from outright... Oh my god. I can't read the book. Yeah, I know. It's incredibly frustrating.

Yeah. I mean, it's not... Great. It came out not that long ago. It's like number almost 5,000 in Barnes & Noble. It's like 40 or 50,000 in Amazon. Like, I don't think it's... 4.5 out of 5? Yeah. I mean, you have your friends all.

It has not been the giant success that I think he hoped it would. They were hoping it would like... Clearly, this book has angled at like converting a bunch of people to the right, and I don't think it did that. Yeah. Stop hating America, the western straight

white men. One of the motivations you'll have to stand up against the mob is that you'll love your country, the straight white men within it, and western values in general. In fact, you'll know that America isn't perfect, nor can any nation ever be, but that she has granted more people more freedoms than any other country in the history of the world. You'll also know that straight white men aren't evil.

It's actually racist and sexist to believe so. And that western values are rooted in individual rights, or the cornerstone of free societies. And again, this is like, he talks about how you have to have your facts straight and go into debate with facts, but of course, he doesn't like do that with this, where number one nobody

in any sort of prominent position anywhere on the left is saying that straight white men are evil. They're saying that the concept of whiteness is fundamentally toxic, and we need to reorient our societies away from it. And also, the idea that western values rooted in individual rights are the cornerstones of free society ignores a couple of things. You want me to list

a couple of those things? In the 1770s, when the British conquered India and then starved between 30 and 40 million people to death in order to maximize the profits of the British East India company, that was not rooted in individual rights, was it? Not super rooted in individual rights.

When the European powers took over basically the entire Middle East and partitioned it up without asking any of the people who lived in the former Ottoman Empire where they wanted to live in the Sykes-Picot agreement, and then forced a lot of them under dictators in order to maximize oil revenue, that was not

like, you know, super respectful of individual rights. When the United States had Salvador Aende assassinated or a lot of other leaders assassinated in Central America and then backed death squads through schools of the America, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leading to mass rape campaigns including the burning alive of numerous

nuns, that was also not rooted in respect for individual rights. You might say Western values have never been rooted in individual rights and have instead been rooted in plundering the rest of the world for the wealth of the West who get

to have individual rights as long as they don't criticize the plundering of the world. Anyway, fun, David Rubin. I brought some facts, Dave. We can talk about those if you want. I'll go on your show. He'll never agree to any type of back and forth.

He would just expose him, right? Yeah. Okay, but I will say I I'm skimming through these reviews on Amazon. Oh, yeah. I don't want to throw up. Oh, are they just cloying? They're overwhelmingly positive.

I'm sure he must have bought some of them. I refuse to believe this many idiots exist in the world, but there's this really long one that's near the top that is basically a five star review. This book can change your life. It talks about how he used

to be. He used to call himself a feminist and how feminist in his own life canceled him because of arguments about the crime of rape. And this is just... Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I wonder what those arguments were. God. Well, I can continue if you're curious.

Yeah, please. No, I want to know what this guy... I want to know this Dave Rubin fans hot take on rapes. Well, okay. This is like the third or fourth... Those are the fourth paragraph down of this essay review. It says the first line of it is I had never heard of David Rubin when I was

a fan of the Young Turks and while I still called past tense, I called myself a feminist. Feminists in my own life canceled me for numerous reasons or attempted to in parentheses. One of the arguments was over the crime of rape. As in, rape is a heinous crime

that has best practices for prevention and resistance, just like preventing and resisting the crime of murder, where men number upon its primary victims. The audacity that one would talk about preventing rape as if the solution is not to simply tell men to rape less. We have

laws against such things and these simple school marm admonitions surprise don't work on rapists. This got me canceled by more people that I can count, including one person who I had the displeasure of seeing introduce Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins for one of their gatherings.

By this time I had taken a major dose of the red... I had a major dose of the red pill and I was seeking some type of comfort. Was I crazy? Could I be literally Hitler because I dare think outside the feminist orthodoxy of leftist

lockstep. Enter David Rubin. Oh my god, then the rest of it is Enter David Rubin and how this man changed his life. Oh my god. People for the most part, aren't I don't believe people have been calling

him literally Hitler for his controversial stance on rape. I think they've been like, dude, what the fuck? Like, why are you so adamant about arguing with everybody about rape? And like, what is wrong with you? What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?

Oh my god. Also, apparently he dedicated the book to Ben Affleck. Is that what David Rubin did? That's what Chad says on Amazon. Is that real? That seems like it's got to be a joke. I have to double check this.

Oh, it is. It is for Ben Affleck. I'm sure that's some sort of joke that we don't get because we don't watch his terrible show. I don't know. That's horrible. Well, no, it's not. Fuck Ben Affleck. I don't think Ben Affleck believes anything other

than having a gigantic hideous tattoo of a phoenix on his back, which in fairness to Ben Affleck is more of a commitment than Dave Rubin has ever made to anything controversial. Of course. Like, you got to give Affleck credit. It is not a cowardly decision to have the tattoo

that he has. That is a commitment. That is a commitment to a type of person you are going to be with anything else, let alone the tattoo itself. I will say I'm not an Affleck fan. The only thing that Affleck that I respect Affleck for is I think it was like in

2014 or something. But I dislike Bill Maher a lot. He's a piece of shit. I hate Bill Maher. But when he was on his show and Bill Maher was being his regular Islamophobic self, Ben Affleck

fought back against him on his show. He was one of the only commentators on the stage that was really upset or something and fought back pretty hard. So I really respected him for that reason. But as a regular person, I yeah. I will say of Ben Affleck and this is actually my favorite thing

about Ben Affleck is that he looks like a man who committed that despite his fame and despite being classically handsome most of the time and despite like the legions of adoring fans he's had throughout aspects of his career. He committed to never not being the kind of guy

who would throw empty cans of steel reserve at his television at four in the morning. And that's what his back tattoo represents. Like Ben Affleck. The Phoenix rising out of the ashes. Yeah. And then a hook in a steel reserve can at the television because he's angry at it. That's Ben Affleck.

I will say I don't find him attractive in the slightest, but No, but clearly he must have to someone right? He had that whole career. I mean, yeah, someone made him Batman. Whatever. Like apparently he is he takes some boxes for some people. But people want to fuck Ben Affleck and that's fine for them.

Ben Affleck is this classic example of white men just needing to be above a certain height to be considered attractive in my opinion. This is just turned into a Ben Affleck Stan podcast. Stan. No. Stan. I mean, I can't think of a single movie he's been in where I actually

cared about his his appearance at all. But I love the pictures of him like shirtless and out of shape drunk and staring out at things in. I will say, yeah. Depression. There's something tragically beautiful about that. Yeah. I admire that greatly because I

have that energy myself a lot of the time. Just like, fuck this shit. I'm going to drink a 40 and those are some of the best photos of someone else's trash can. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it's pretty great. We're talking about Ben Affleck right now because Dave Rubin

sucks so bad that we're all thinking like, ah, Ben Affleck. There's a person that I don't despise. But he's dedicated his book to him. So it is kind of weird. It is relevant. It is relevant. You know what's better than Dave Rubin and a more honest intellectual

thinker than Dave Rubin? Raytheon. Exactly. Raytheon. Well, Dave Rubin vacillates and, you know, refuses to commit and just lets fascists talk over him and platforms them. Raytheon doesn't

platform anybody. They just build missile guidance systems that kill people in Yemen. And you know what? I don't have... Let's roll the rest of the ads. Okay. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the

FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes

you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI despised on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story

is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure

he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was

23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union

is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic

and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. To tell you the truth, it's not a problem. It's not a problem. It's a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science

in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! And speaking of backs, I spent the ad break looking at that picture of Ben Affleck's unbelievable back tattoo, which I, at no point in my life will I ever have had enough of realizing that

in everything Ben Affleck's ever done, underneath his shirt all the time, you can't escape it. Can't escape it. Alright, let's read what Dave Rubin has to say about drugs. I've done a pretty decent amount of drugs in my day, which is a sign that someone's either done no drugs

or only done cocaine. I've smoked pot, snorted coke, eaten magic mushrooms. I've danced poorly on ecstasy and probably a couple of other things. These days I'm a red wine and indica guy, but I don't deny my past. Yada, yada, yada, yada.

Anyone that calls magic mushrooms has never done shrooms. He's doing a standard libertarian thing about how we should just legalize this stuff, which is fine. It's the standard libertarian thing you've got to go through. Yada, yada, yada.

The catch is that this libertarian-inspired view falls apart when it starts to include schedule one substances, such as crack and heroin, which is obviously very different. Crack is just cocaine. Crack is just a form of cocaine. You're just criminalizing the version

that you think black people tend to do. He has no idea about the history of crack and why it's called crack. I don't know, man. What a fucking joke. These are the drugs that need the lightest possible touch of government

to criminalize them. Because freedom can't be a free-for-all, so you're just cheap. We don't want a breaking bad episode happening next to it. If methamphetamine were manufactured by the government and the way that certain schedule one narcotics are in parts of Europe,

and we're distributed to people who take it and that were a thing that they could do and get a consistent product and not have to deal with drug dealers, then maybe there wouldn't be as much street crime and maybe because they're going into government facilities

healthcare, and hopefully eventually get off of meth, which is how they've treated heroin addiction very successfully in parts of Scandinavia. But like Dave, again, the guy who talks about coming armed with facts doesn't. He just talks about how, oh, okay. So he talks about how bad and scary San Francisco is because of meth and opiates.

And that's why the government needs to criminalize those drugs is because San Francisco is scary. And which is like, I fucking grew up in Dallas, dude. Like there's parts of Dallas, like San Francisco's got its sketchy like neighborhoods largely because there's just a lot of houseless people who the local city government and like the NIMBY type rich folks don't want to help.

But like fucking hang out in Dallas or fucking Atlanta or like a whole like every city. Yeah, anyone that calls San Francisco scary has lived a very privileged life to say the least. Yeah, it's a mix of like what they consider scary. Like right, it's in a lot of the deep South you deal with more meth jacks in San Francisco, you're more likely to find needles on the ground.

But it's like, yeah, all of them are symptoms of the fact that our society has serious problems. It's not the fault of the actual individual substances because we know that that's not how addiction works. Our society has failed so many people. And it's just not the fault of those people is the fault of a society at large. But then making it sound like they are the reasons

why a city is scary. That is so problematic. Yeah, it's the whole like Dave's whole argument basically is that like I think the drugs that white people do should be legal. Of course, of course. Or at least that I see white people doing should be legal. So yeah, this whole section is basically him explaining

why like if you support things like gay marriage and that kind of stuff you're a classical liberal like him. Although you should still support people who are caught with heroin or meth being put in prison rather than receiving treatment because San Francisco is scary. Dave Rubin is a consistent guy. Oh God, okay, here's his views on abortion. No.

Before this process started, I'd always been solidly pro-choice. Though in the last two years or so, I've begun to describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice after you're learning more about the biology of gestation and the process of abortion and seeing the left fetishize it in a way I'm not comfortable with. There are countless videos on YouTube

of women celebrating their termination while organizations such as Shout Your Abortion encourages Twitter users to do the same with Carefree Abandon. Okay, I'm sorry, I started vomiting when you said the word gestation. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, it's him number one,

like willfully misunderstanding like the difference between people being like, hey, you shouldn't be ashamed if you've had an abortion. People need to be more open about that fact so that like there's less stigma around it. Normalize it, yeah. Like you're not saying like, yay, I love the fact that I got an abortion,

it's fun, let's go get another. Nobody like enjoys that process, but there's no shame in it. That's the whole point of that shit. There's no shame in it, yeah. Yeah, it's just a thing that you do. And there's like you're normalizing like talking about it and being open about it makes it less of a taboo

and makes it less of something that you feel shame around. It's not about being proud that you terminated a pregnancy, it's about normalizing, even seeking it out. And so it's not the shameful taboo topic. It's this thing that conservatives keep doing with like, they do it with sex education too, where like if you're in favor of like kids getting better sex education,

then you're in favor of sexualizing children. It's like, no, like you shouldn't even be telling kids that like sex is good or bad. You should just be explaining very simply what it is, how it works, how their bodies work. Like it should be like learning about the fucking Falklands invasion or whatever. It should be just another fucking class,

like this is your body, this is how it works, this is how this all like, you were not, nobody's sexualizing kids, you're trying to teach them shit. It should just, because it is, it's sex, it should not be this thing we only talk about behind closed doors. Like normalizing, talking about it starts,

it should start very young and it should start just as an educational thing. And conservatives make everything about be like, they just twist it. They twist it so strangely. Yeah. All right, this is a terrible book. Let's move down to the fucking Nazi.

Okay, I wanna see some of these. Don't worry, you're not a Nazi. Oh God, don't worry, you're not a Nazi. That's what someone says who is a Nazi. Congratulations, I have fantastic news. You are not a Nazi. You may be wondering how I know this, considering we've probably never met,

but trust me, I know what's vitally going forward is that you know this too. You don't know David. He's like making a sound like, if you're reading this book, you're a good person. You're smart enough to not be a Nazi. I know that. Because you bought this book by me.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so he goes into how Nazis were actually socialists. People have totally rewritten history on the matter. No, they haven't. They just understand that it was like a branding sort of thing and that there was a left wing

of the Nazi party that all got murdered in the night of long knives. That's what that was, David, was the left wing of the Nazi party all getting killed. But again, none of these people have ever, oh yeah, he talks about how Hitler was on the left because he was an art loving vegetarian and that he wooed voters away

from Germany's social democrat and communist. Most of Hitler, like the core of Hitler's support came from the German conservatives. I'm pretty sure he just called Hitler a slipper. The monarchists in the right wing, but okay. Like again, just completely, completely. And like here's, okay, so this is funny. So he talks about how Mussolini also has to have clearly

come up from been a left wing guy because he started out as a left wing journalist, which is true. Mussolini was initially a socialist and a left winger like Dave Rubin. Then he became a fascist. Like Dave Rubin, you know? He kind of glossed over that fact.

Oh, cool. He just talks about how real Nazis hated gays and Jews to the point of mass extermination of them. And which is true, Nazis killed a lot of gay people. Let's talk about Ernst Rome. You've heard of the brown shirts, right? Yes. Yeah, they were Hitler's street by his proud boys.

These were guys who'd go out in the street and like murder left wing activists. They were his enforcers, the like violent arm of the Nazi electoral movement. The head of the SA, the head of the brown shirts was in a flamboyantly and fairly openly gay man named Ernst Rome, who was caught when Hitler decided he had to kill him

because the Nazis had gained power and they wanted to purge the left and Rome was an embarrassment because he was gay. They found him at like a giant orgy at a castle with a bunch of his like boy toys and stuff. And he, like he, like, Rome, the Nazis had a ton of gay members early on. They killed them all after they got into power,

which might be a warning to fucking Dave Rubin. Like, when you truck with these people who hate you, they will use you while you're valuable for them to get in power and then they'll put you in a camp or just have you shoot yourself in a prison, David. Actually read some history. He's like mapping out his own demise, not knowingly.

Exactly. Yeah, these people are very frustrating. I do like that he said that Hitler was on the left because he was an art-loving vegetarian. He just basically called him a hipster, right? Like, it's like, I don't know, it's just like the weirdest thing to be like, to prove a point.

He does point out that someone on Twitter said, Dave Rubin isn't a Nazi. It's just that he'd sit across from Himmler and say, interesting a lot, which is actually a pretty accurate. Yeah, it's good stuff. I can't believe he's so, he's that idiotic to not realize that he, people will,

he can only go so far with this shtick, I feel like, right? Yeah, yeah, and it does seem like he's kind of, he's running to the end of his griff. Now, he did get very rich. We'll see how long that lasts and how long he's able to like carry some of this sht for. But I don't think he's going to have a super long career after this because like,

especially if hopefully things go well in the election, I mean, we'll fucking see. But even now, like with Trump and power, like as always happens to these guys, he is rapidly lost influence because Dave Rubin was only ever valuable as a vehicle to like push these far-right thinkers, just like all the other intellectual dark web guys.

And now that it's become mainstream to just openly call for the executions of your political opponents and the installation of a dictatorship among the right, there's not a whole lot of need for classical liberals, you know? Yeah. I don't know. We'll see, maybe I'm wrong.

I hope not, I hope you're right. I mean, I trust your instincts. I hope this is the last time I'll ever have to talk about him. But yeah, God, what a garbage man. Yeah, he's trash. And I think we're done talking about him. Wait, I don't want to, wait, sorry.

I insulted actual people that work as garbage men. That's not what I meant. Oh, no, no, garbage men are awesome. Yeah, no, one of the most important jobs in the entire civilization. Yeah, he is a man made of garbage. Yes. That's what I meant. He is like a pile of trash.

He's not a garbage man. A garbage man would remove him to a dump and thus carry out an incredibly necessary role in modern civilization. An act of service to help us all. Yeah, thank you, garbage men. And women and non-binary garbage people of all sorts. Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to clarify

and since before someone jumped on me saying that term. Yeah, nothing but love for garbage people here, but not people made of garbage. We're gonna need to work on some of the language here, but that can happen later. Shareen, you got any pluggables to plug? Pluggables to plug. Well, you can follow me along the interwebs if you want.

I'm shirohero on Instagram, S-H-E-E-R-O, H-E-R-O. And then on Twitter, it's shirohero666. Yeah, and I have a podcast called Ethically Ambiguous and I'm writing a second poetry book. My first one is out there somewhere. But yeah, I am trying to work on more films. So if you wanna see what I come up with, follow me along if you want.

And if you don't, I get it. Well, follow Shareen and what? I don't know, I was gonna have a joke, but I don't have a joke. I don't have a joke to end this on. Make your own fucking jokes, people. What, you think I owe you a joke right now just because you listened to my episode?

I'm sorry, I'm getting abusive now and that's not good. Robert, Robert, Robert. Think back to the image, Robert. Think back to the beach, the tattoo. Just go back there. Yeah, fucking, Ben Affleck, bent over, belly spilling out, giant Phoenix tattoo on his back and a 40th steel reserve in his hands.

Just the saddest man who's ever lived. God, I love him. Robert, you kind of went Robert Evans' lust bad there. Oh no. What's that? Oh yeah, well yeah, and watch me on Fox News for my new show, Left Equals Bad, filmed on my private island that I bought with the $80 million they gave me.

Yeah, yeah, those flight logs, gotta watch out. Well, listen now, we don't need to talk about, okay, episode's done. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I oughta know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.