Is Dave Rubin really a conservative or
is he a grifter who just caters to conservatives for profit?
That was the real question that was asked in a lengthy QAled piece that was
written recently by Ross Anderson.
And I think it's worth discussing, because there are so
many different themes within this lengthy piece that makes me reflect on media.
And also makes me question why anyone would really
think that Dave Rubin has any real political identity.
But let me give you a few excerpts and you guys can decide for yourselves.
He writes, it's tempting to explain Rubin's motives as nakedly mercenary, and
to dismiss him as nothing more than a cynical grifter.
This is the view held by Cenk Uygur, who tells me that Rubin has no values,
just opinions for hire.
Several comedians I spoke to who saw his lust for
fame on the cold streets of New York agreed, I don't, he writes.
Now, he follows that paragraph up with the following.
Rubin is in no meaningful sense a conservative, and
admitted as much to Bill Maher.
He's an anti-leftist culture warrior whose right-wing economics, lower taxes and
deregulation, are expressed in slogans and buoyed by self interest.
But from his Zionism to his interest and gay issues,
Rubin's politics have always been primarily personal.
So I think that very last sentence, Cenk, is accurate, because it is personal.
He's fluid in his political identity depending on what's more advantageous for
him in any given moment.
Now, the statement about his Zionism is fascinating,
because he had all sorts of anti-Semites on his show and
didn't even bother to challenge them on their anti-Semitic comments.
But I'm curious what you think.
>> Yeah, I think that maybe we're the unique ones.
We care about principles and ideology and what is right and wrong, facts.
And by the way, sometimes the facts don't go in the way that you expected because of
your ideology, you still got to be honest about the facts.
Whereas, I think a lot of people in media are like Dave Rubin, where they think,
yeah, but how does it affect me?
Okay, so in Dave's case, his parents met on a kibbutz or
whatever, he's been to Israel many times, so
he cares a lot about being a right winger in Israel, for whatever it's worth.
Israel must be protected at all costs, and he was on our programming, this is
the first time we got a hint of him being right wing, when he talked about Israel.
And he famously asked us to take out a portion of an interview where he
basically said, yeah,
it's okay to bomb a school full of children if it means protecting Israel.
And so, okay, that's personal to him, I get it.
And then, if he feels like he's being attacked from the left, he's gonna call
that cancel culture and he's gonna hate that, and that's personal to him.
But the the biggest part that's personal to him is,
once he starts making money from a certain direction, he thinks,
well, why would I do anything else?
That's where I'm buying these giant homes from,
of course I'm gonna go in that direction, whichever direction that is.
And that's something hard for us to relate to, because we care about facts and
we're not just in it for personal gain.
>> Now, remember when Dave did his notorious, why I left the left video,
for Prager, he didn't mention cancel culture or
being scolded by the left, no one even cared to scold him.
I mean, he didn't really ever say anything provocative or interesting anyway.
So the idea that the scolding is what pushed him to the right is hilarious,
it is self interest.
In fact, I think a really great example that's provided in this piece
is how Dave Rubin came to be such an ardent Trump supporter.
So, Ross Anderson writes about how Dave has basically failed in where he really,
really wanted his career to go, which was late night comedy.
He wanted to be one of these late night comics, and
he hustled like crazy in his 20s, according to Anderson,
he was super enthusiastic about it, but he never made it.
And so, that seems to be a chip on his shoulder type situation, and
the one person who gave him the validation that he so
desperately wanted was Donald Trump, and I didn't even know this stuff.
I gotta be honest with you guys, I have not been keeping up with Dave Rubin stuff.
So I knew that he kind of supported Trump but I wasn't sure to what extent,
get a load of this though.
According to Rubin and his husband David Janet,
when Trump learned that the two men were married during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago,
he he said, quote, I want to shake your hands, that's just great.
In that moment Rueben, the gay former comic, who drank away the pain of his
denied identity and never received the acclaim he hustled for, was recognized for
who he was by the President of the United States, a Republican.
Dining out in LA during the run up to the 2020 election,
Rubin abruptly exploded after a dining companion flippantly criticized Trump.
His face reddening, he began slamming the table and
ranting in defense of the president.
That's one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
That everything that Trump has done,
it just gets erased the second he says something complimentary to Dave Rubin,
because for Dave Rubin, politics is about Dave Rubin.
It's not about the country, it's not about making this a better place for
Americans to live in, for kids to grow up in, it's about feeling validated and
feeling like people in positions of power like him.
And that's it, that's all it is, it's always self serving.
>> Yeah, Ana, I think that there's two themes throughout the article that I
probably connect a lot of these, what we now call grifters, right?
And so, whether it's Dave Rubin or Jimmy Dore,
the two things they're desperately seeking our validation and money.
I'm gonna give you a quote from the article.
And I'm not sure I even agree with the first part of it, but Ross Anderson wrote,
he's not stupid, but he has found that he needn't worry about being scrupulous or
consistent, informed or nuanced, so simply, doesn't bother.
Okay, so in my experience with Dave, he was lazy,
it was a problem that I had with him, that was not ideological.
It didn't get to the point where I thought he needed to be fired over it,
but he didn't much care about the material, right?
And it turns out, cuz he doesn't really care about any politics,
he just cares about, where's the goddamn money.
And if someone ever gonna give me a pat on the back and recognized me as
probably the Dave Letterman Jon Stewart that he imagined himself to be.
And once the right wing gave him both of those things, he scurried to their corner,
incredibly fast, because he had no moral core to begin with,
let alone consistent political beliefs.
>> The final thing I wanted to mention is audience capture, because I do think
audience capture is real and I think it affects all sorts of independent media and
digital media outlets.
And it's a problem, but Dave Rubin seems pretty oblivious to it.
So, the piece references a tweet by liberal activists accusing Dave of
being captured by a right wing audience.
So he caters to that right wing audience by constantly telling them what they want
to hear, that's how he makes his money.
So, Ali Rizvi is the one who said this.
You go independent, build a patron following,
giving you tens of thousands a month, build a studio, hire a staff, and
then it turns out a huge chunk of your donations come from Trump supporters.
What do you do?
You're helpless.
Fully funded activism will always be compromised.
Now, that last statement seems harsh,
but I think that there's actually a lot of truth to it, right?
Because, are you gonna bite the hand that feeds,
especially if you know where your bread is buttered, right?
And in this case, the right wing audience,
the patron donors are the ones who funded Dave Rubin's whole outfit, but
Rubin seems like he doesn't even really know what audience capture is.
So, in the piece, Anderson writes, this process is known as audience capture,
a term popularized, I don't even know this, by Eric Weinstein, and
it is a major worry for the wide range of crowd-funded interviewers, podcasters, and
journalists with whom I've spoken.
Except Dave Rubin, who dismissed my questions as if it were absurd.
Quote, I don't worry about it at all, Dave said.
And then Anderson writes, it's not even clear that he knows what I'm getting at,
because he then elaborates by addressing a different concern.
Quote, I am completely independent, I have never had anyone ask me to say
something or tell me to say something, I am my boss.
The show sinks or swims on what I want to do.
That's what Dave Rubin said.
Yeah, but
that would make sense if we're having a conversation about corporate sponsors,
hitting up the executives at MSNBC to tell them, hey, this host is a problem.
Because he or she is being critical of something that impacts our business,
tell them to shut up, that's not what we're talking about here.
We're specifically talking about, again, catering to a specific audience,
in the case of Dave Rubin, a right wing audience that will not take
well to hearing things they don't wanna hear.
And by the way, I mean, we're not insulated from that either,
we just don't fall victim to it, because we're gonna say what we wanna say, right?
So oftentimes we say things on the show, Cenk, that the audience doesn't like.
Well, if you wanna be lied to, go somewhere else, but
we're gonna tell you what our honest analysis is.
It is what it is [LAUGH].
>> Yeah, so when I talked to Ross Anderson, I talked to him about audience
capture, and I told him, it's a real problem and we're cognizant of it.
And that we see, for example, when I criticized Obama,
we lost a lot of subscribers back in 2009, all the way back then, right?
And we could have made the decision, respond by flattering Obama,
you'll get more viewers and more money, but
we chose actively not to do that, because we were in the news business.
But a lot of people have made the opposite choice.
But guys, in case you were thinking, well,
he's got a $6 million house that looks like down in Florida and
former NBA players' house, maybe that's the right way to go.
God damn it, that's a lot of money, right?
Well, it always ends pathetically and tragically.
So, that's why I want to get to graphics 11 and 12 here.
At the end of the piece, they tell you that, hey, he did move,
he moved down to Florida, where they don't say gay bill.
That didn't work out that great for him, because then he and
his husband Dave Janet decided they were going to have two kids from surrogates.
And of course the right wing hates the LGBTQ community, so
they were furious and they lashed out at him in every conceivable way.
And then they explain,
a change.org petition demanded that Rubin be fired from the Blaze.
It was soon taken down after signatories flooded the comments with the word, well,
the F word, as you guys might have guessed.
Rubin's former friend, Milo Yiannopoulos, who Rubin platformmed,
earlier did a fawning ass kissing interview with earlier in his career,
called a couple, quote, disgusting, before adding that they should both be executed.
A few days later, Blaze founder Glenn Beck interviewed a visibly
shaken Rubin on his show, Ruben limply tried to blame the reaction on
leftist intolerance, of course, Milo's radical right wing.
Beck compared Rubin's homosexuality to alcoholism.
That was his way of sympathizing.
I mean, there's something wrong with you, you have a disease,
you have a problem, but hey, my heart goes out to you.
The audience's heart did not go out to Dave Rubin, and
all of a sudden that audience that he had been captured by,
turned on him, and now he's really in every direction.
And Anderson says this near the end of the piece.
As his friends privately admit, he is psychologically ill-equipped for
the position which he has found himself.
The story of his media arctic rise to fame is, finally, a strangely tragic one.
He is Faust's Republican, the fallen clown, and
the definition of the kind of elitist he has always most despised,
hypersensitive, hyper-partisan, and failing upwards.
Ouch!
>> Man, that was quite a paragraph.
I both enjoyed reading it, but also felt a little sad.
Because, I mean, the whole thing about being hyper-partisan,
failing upwards, that's what stood out to me.
It's so true.
I mean, it's almost as if things are set up by design,
to help people fail upward, right?
Whereas, doing the right thing, being principled, having values, and sticking to
those values, you do, at least in the short term, get punished for it, right?
I mean, you got punished for it for
speaking the truth about Obama during his first term, I'm getting punished for
it because I dare to speak out about obvious rising crime in big cities.
I mean, I'm supposed to pretend like I don't see it, I'm supposed to say, no,
it's it's all made up and it's all just right wing talking points, but
I'm living in it.
So, how am I gonna lie to myself and lie to my audience?
I just can't do that.
>> I know, so look guys, there's two ways to go about things in media,
unfortunately.
90% of media, whether it's right wing media, these independents like Rubin,
or mainstream media, you serve money and you get money.
So that's why they, quote unquote, fail upwards,
even though they're not getting as much audience, even though they're not doing
the principles of journalism, etc, they're getting tons of money.
Why? Cuz they're selling out.
It's funny cuz he had this shop earlier in his career,
this is where he sold his merch called Rubin Ville Sellout.
[LAUGH] I don't know that anything has ever been more appropriately named, but
that's why you see this strange phenomenon, when people do worse things,
they get more money.
Because they're literally being paid for those opinions.
But at the end, it's always tragic, it's always pathetic.
I don't wanna anywhere near those ends, so I'm perfectly happy to make less money,
doing something we love and something that is true.
And we have way bigger audience than all those fools combined,
maybe we don't have as much money, but the people are here.