The Sad Change of Dave Rubin
Picture a man with a show which is hosted by a small TV channel. The show, with a set design that resembles a lounge from a $2,000,000 home, had guests come on to sigh about being the anxiety of progressive circles in the country. He’s lauded and credited in many media outlets for being outspoken against the excesses of radical Islam, social justice and advancing the free speech brigade, thereby rescuing the Left from its worst impulses. Now that the show have fully gone independent, promising to be devoted entirely to its audience. But then, a year later, he declares in a video that he left the Left. That person is Dave Rubin and that show is The Rubin Report.
Rubin reminds me of Jimmy Fallon if The Late Show host was a 24/7 political pundit. The formula of the show consists his monologue, The Direct Message, which is typically about the Left and free speech. Then he sits down with his guests and he lets them talk for minutes on end with little interrogation. On September, he returned for a third season with a short beard following a month-long break off the grid, missing out on a continually frantic news cycle. He was busy writing a book, hosting a talk with Richard Dawkins and appeared on The Greg Gutfeld Show.
The most recent episode, and perhaps the only one I watched in 2017, was his interview with journalist Douglas Murray, promoting his fascinating book The Strange Death of Europe. But it starkly reminded me of how much the Rubin Report once had potential to be intellectually stimulating show about politics and how much it had swiftly declined.
In the first version of The Rubin Report, hosted on Ora TV, the show’s bumper music was upbeat, the set design was bright and highly contrasted. In his direct messages, the host spoke very quick, usually under five minutes, enthusiastic on the show’s purpose of true debate. In the current iteration of the show, independent and funded by fans from Patreon, the bumper music is serious, the set lighting is dim and Rubin speaks slowly for over five minutes. Here there’s only five type of camera angles all of which were static. The original version at least had a camera hover above the guests.
I listened to a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, where two conservatives talks about the state of centre right media (both of whom run their own publications). During the podcast, Charles CW Cooke, the editor of National Review Online, states that conservative converts speak as if they had spoken out against the Church of Scientology. It’s an observation that painfully reveals a lot about the Right today. Half of their messaging is pushing people’s transition as their forefront, or as it’s colloquially named ‘red-pilled’. The other half is to do anything, regardless of principle, to startle the Left. Nothing in their hearts, apart from free speech and civil liberties, that they believe in works. But if it triggers the Left, then it’s ok. There seems to be a growing trend of people, once of the centre-left persuasion, defecting to the Right or at least having common ground with their opponents. Often, they end up having opinions that are unrestrained, or change their minds on things that, in the past, had remained reasonable.
Rubin has become the mascot for converts of the Right, as the Left becomes abandoned by people finding a vacant spot in a space that believe in civil liberties, freedoms and human rights. That space is now carried out by the Right, who sometimes can be woeful at upholding a civil discourse.
Whatever the validity of their alienation, a pattern of each guest in the show’s duration becomes concrete. His guests are those who had angered progressive circles leaving each episode to resemble an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Those include James Damore, the man who penned a memo on Google’s hiring practices that he got fired, Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen professor who was shouted down by college students for not attending a conference on race. Colin Moriarty, a host of a video games podcast, who got sacked following wide outrage surrounding a joke on Twitter that was widely deemed as sexist. His first ever episodes, with the atheist thinker Sam Harris and ex-Muslim Maajid Nawaz, were all based on both being shouted down by the press for their criticisms on Islam, to the point that they’re dismissed as racists or porch monkeys. It’s almost disheartening to see a commentator, like Harris with complex thoughts about spirituality, being reduced to a trope.
The vitriol he attracts comes with a sense of betrayal. A contingent of Rubin’s critics voice their loud disapproval through Twitter, with widely shared clips featuring him saying cringeworthy things, whether he’s saying that Jesus lived with Muhammad as an actual fact or talking about a vague New Center with Mike Cernovich, Paul Joseph Watson and Stefan Molyneux. Had Rubin committed an ounce of research on any of his three guests, he would have had an opportunity to push back. It would at least resemble a show that serves the idea of a ‘battle of ideas’. Instead, he softballs them as defenders of the virtues he believes in, while ignoring the odious elements of their philosophy.
Rubin has three types of detractors: progressives, who wouldn’t like the show anyway since they’re its punching bag. Atheists, dismayed that he’s becoming more open to religion. And more importantly, his ex-fans, as they have watched the show from the beginning when he interviewed Sam Harris, since The Young Turks often smears him. Skim through the Sam Harris subreddit and you’ll see at least one post slamming Rubin. But surf through subreddits centered on Rubin and there’s not one positive post in the first page.
Each of these could not bear him because he would not criticise Donald Trump when he had the chance to. In one episode, Rubin says he’ll be the first ‘to hold Trump’s feet to the fire’. Many hate him now for reducing himself to a one trick pony: a man who promotes his show as a forefront for discussing big ideas, when it’s only narrowed to the bare basics of hotter topics and having guests with less credible perspectives speak about how much the Left sucks. His earnestly specific lexicon where phrases such as “regressive left”, “classical liberal” and “battle of ideas” are frequently uttered that their meanings are stuck out in the speed of a vacuum.
This pass that Rubin gives to Trump isn’t new. He is vehemently hated by pretty much everyone, that those in the conservative movement have no idea what to do with him, now that he’s often associated with their tribes. Conservative commentary, much of which have been against him during his 2016 presidential campaign for not being the ideological in the GOP’s rankings, would constantly criticise him, while others have to justify his actions, even when they’re in the absurd position of judging him as the President of the United States, rather than an election candidate.
Rubin is confused. He declared that he left the left because it does not fit what he thinks a liberal should be. He made dumb assertions that Martin Luther King Jr, a civil rights leader who has been a champion for democratic socialism, would be a conservative in this decade based on a frequently cited bit from his I Have a Dream speech where they won’t judge people by the color of their skin. Crucially, he remains in favour of single-payer healthcare, while bearing the flag of Hayekian liberalism. In a talk with David Pakman, his justifications on having a free market system while remaining single payer seem really flimsy and unconvincing.
You might have noticed that until now, I have not commented about Rubin’s fixation on libertarianism, or as he justify as classical liberalism. His use of the term is apt, as it isn’t the American definition of a liberal, which refers to as social democrat, but rather the 18th century’s definition. When he’s not hosting guests who aren’t hurt by the Left, he hosts people of the libertarian bent, circling around the label as if he still hasn’t come around identifying as one. This makes the show the epitome of T-shirt version of the ideology, where you figuratively wear a shirt that says ‘look at me. I’m a classical liberal’ and pat yourself on the back for holding these beliefs. No joke, after his absence, he literally wears a navy blue T-Shirt that says ‘classical liberal’.
I’m not angry at Rubin anymore than I’m largely disappointed in him. As a person who felt lost in their politics, I felt that he was speaking for me: someone who feels afraid to say what they want to say because of the fear they’ll be piled on by an impatient mob, that they’ve lost a lot of common ground with the Left about free speech or confronting Islam the same way they do with other religions. That the media don’t confront their radicals with the same standards they had to call out the Right.
As Rubin became more exposed to conservatives, so was I. The Rubin Report was perhaps the first ever show where I was exposed to conservatism in a lucid way: it was the first time I’ve been exposed to Milo Yiannopoulos, Douglas Murray and Ben Shapiro. All of these people (well, at least pre-2016 Milo), were principled conservatives who carried many convictions and were keen in debating. You get to hear about Yiannopoulos talk about his fractured relationship with the gay community, while Shapiro expressing his disapproval with Trump, explaining that he’s not a ‘strong man’ President like Ronald Reagan. You hear Murray talk about neoconservatism before expressing his disappointment on the backlash of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. While some will keep being part of the Left and still face people on the Right, most have woken up and embraced them.
For a while, I’ve became a conservative, since I knew my instincts on being in favour of the familiar and resistance to change would permeate that sense of thinking. But I wanted to expand my knowledge on conservatism, away from the ‘PC gone mad’ stories that Rubin limits himself to. I read philosophers such as Edmund Burke and Alexis De Tocqueville, to whom most right-wingers hold to high regard. And there’s probably more to read and learn. While I agree with him a lot on many of his concerns to the Left, he’s incapable of being confronted.
Rubin does not engage in criticism, even when it’s of legitimate good faith. When he was interviewed by conspiracy performance artist Alex Jones as ‘melting snowflakes’. Ironically, his AMA on the subreddit titled classical_liberals was a disaster. He didn’t answer any questions that showcased his flaws. And when he did, he cowardly deflected with ‘I didn’t know’ or ‘there are millions of other channels’. The only time he did, with the faith he once had with his audience, was in a direct message before the first Yiannopoulos interview was when he mistakenly called Ben Carson a ‘neuroscientist’. It was, as stated, a minor error.
Rubin started the show, as a bleeding-heart progressive, in hopes of what he could do to fix the Left, so that some would follow his footsteps. Two years later, he would appear on PragerU to declare his defection, much to the adoration of what he once called his enemies. He does not have the knowledge, nor the intellectual combat to debate people. He nods while David Horowitz tells him that Barack Obama was a communist and or when Lauren Southern says Richard Spencer isn’t a white supremacist, but rather a white nationalist, as if the distinction was supposed to make him better.
The interest surrounding The Rubin Report from me stops there, but I haven’t stopped following his tracks quite yet. While I’ve given up on his show, I’ll definitely read the book he promised and we’ll see how it goes. Maybe it will reveal the scope of his ‘awakening’. Maybe it would be a fiction book about a young man climbing Mount Everest. Politics have often made people of any kind zealously righteous to the point of delusion. He sees things in black and white when the world’s against him. The most vulnerable tends to be the learner, who after reading one textbook of politics, deludes himself as a mastermind of the subject. Rubin proves to be no exception to both.
