‘I Don’t Give a S*** That You’re Gay’: Dave Rubin Talks Trump, the Culture Wars, and Freedom

Dave Rubin speaks to lotuseaters.com from sunny Florida where he resides with his husband, affectionately referred to as “the other Dave.” We talk about embracing capitalism, the pivotal importance of self-reliance, meeting Trump, the “insufferable ignorance” of Queers for Palestine, his Jewish roots, Postmodernism, and the urgent need to conserve the values of life and liberty upon which America was founded.

I start by commenting on Rubin’s informal writing style, a facet of his character making his latest publication, Don’t Burn This Country, all the more pleasurable to read. 

It’s something I don’t have to try very hard at, it’s what feels natural to me. I try to write in a similar way to how I would speak to my audience.

As you know, now that I’m doing this daily show where I’m just talking to the crowd for 45 minutes a day, my thoughts are pretty compiled, they’re pretty organised. Even though I don’t script the show, I generally have a pretty good sense of what I want to talk about. I wake up and see the crazy clips of whatever Jen Psaki was saying or Joe Biden or whoever, and then I just share my feelings with people. 

This book was more research-heavy, but I always try to present the information humanely—too much politics is hostile and angry. I just try to do it in a more calm way.

Speaking of the need to embrace capitalism, you contend that money is not “the root of all evil.” Is it rather that society has, as you say, an ‘out of whack’ relationship with money?

This is an important point because so many people say these phrases, like ‘money is the root of all evil’, and think they make sense automatically. Well, I know plenty of people who have a lot of money and do a lot of good with that money, whether it’s donating to charity, family, or helping to build schools or hospitals. 

We unfortunately have a very guilt-ridden society where you should somehow be ashamed if you have something, or if someone before you worked very hard for something. If you were born middle class or upper-middle class, or my god if you were born really upper-class, then you should feel guilty about it. You should be giving your money away—you should feel like something was done wrong.

It’s basically an erasure of history. This is the point that I was trying to make in Don’t Burn This Country. You can look back to anyone’s family in America and see that their ancestors came here pretty much with nothing—we all have the same story. 

For me, it was my great grandparents who were first-generation immigrants. They have the same old story that everyone has, whether they’re Irish or Italian or Jewish or whatever. They—my great grandparents—came here with the clothes on their backs and maybe one bag. They lived in tenement buildings in the lower east side with six kids in one bedroom. They worked hard, and then their children worked much harder. My grandfathers—one was a lithographer, and the other worked in a food store—then became sort of lower middle class, and my parents—their children—in turn became middle class. I then grew up sort of upper-middle-class. 

That’s the beauty of the American story—that’s what capitalism provides. The people before you, with some hard work, some opportunity, and the promise of equality used their skills and built better things. It is up to you, in the same way, to take advantage of the capitalist system; to take advantage of the free exchange of goods, the opportunity to showcase your talents, and the ability to put in a lot of hard work. Of course it is not a perfect system—there’s no perfect system—but you’ll likely reap the benefits, as opposed to reaping those benefits for someone else. 

This brings to mind Thomas Sowell’s famous demonstration of the debilitating consequences of the welfare system: a system that as you put in Don’t Burn This Country “keeps the marginalised suppressed.”

This is very true, and in our hearts we all know it. Thomas Sowell, as I say in the book, was a socialist, a communist, and it wasn’t until he left college and started working for the government that he started to see the results of all of these big government programs. He realised the reality of things, that welfare is just a giant money suck for bureaucrats, and that it is designed to keep certain people in poverty. 

You don’t need to read too many studies or even understand Thomas Sowell’s work to know that that’s true though. Just think about basic human behaviour. If you give people a sort of sustainable life, you know, a decent enough apartment and a decent enough amount of food and internet access, it’s going to be very hard for them to say ‘no, now I will take responsibility for my life; I will go and get a better job, I will work harder’. Why would they do any of those things when it would cost them the things that they’re given for free by the state? That has nothing to do with skin colour or ethnicity or anything else, it’s just basic human behaviour. 

In the book, I tell the story about my sister in New York City who was living in a half rent-controlled building and half market-based building. She was paying five thousand dollars for a tiny one-bedroom that the landlord had converted to a two-bedroom, so it was extremely expensive. Meanwhile, the other half of the people in the building were living in the same type of apartment for just a few hundred dollars. They had been there for decades—sometimes it was grandmothers living with grandchildren. 

Reading this I thought of a Trump quote saying that there is nothing more freeing than an honest day’s work and a paycheque. You are being rewarded for something that you’ve actually achieved, and the money gives you freedom of choice, right?

Exactly, it gives you value—that’s the thing that getting something for nothing doesn’t give you. That isn’t to say that there aren’t certain moments when the government should step in and help people, like after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans where, at least from a modern perspective, the government was the only thing that could really aid with the cleanup. But with state involvement in daily life, it’s more about the effect on people’s spirits. The human spirit loves adventure, and part of an adventure is saying ‘hey, I can do something, and there is some value in what I do’. Whether that is talking on YouTube for a living or you’re digging ditches or being a plumber, these are things providing a purpose—people will always need things to be done. On top of that is the hope that if you work in a role for a while and you do it well, then you might end up owning that plumbing or construction or media company. You could franchise it, and you could become a millionaire, if that’s what your goal is. Capitalism is the only system that allows that choice. 

I loved the story of you and your husband’s meeting with President Trump, when he said “I don’t give a s*** that you’re gay.” He also told you that he doesn’t think anybody else does either. That is my observation too, even with much older people for whom the topic is a touch awkward. It’s the 24/7 discussions of LGBTQI+ issues in our culture that the older generations resent I think…

That is so true. The irony is that Trump actually was getting us to that spot, to one where people simply ‘don’t give a s***’. If you think about the 2012 elections, the Republicans had a lot of candidates who were very anti-gay marriage or at least pro-traditional marriage; people like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. They were big candidates for the Republicans, they lasted a long time in the primaries. Of course they are fully entitled to their opinions and to their religious liberties, but if you think about it, within four years Donald Trump had come on the scene and he became the first-ever first-time president that was fully for gay marriage. Barack Obama can’t even take that title. Trump just sort of ended the issue. 

That isn’t to say that people can’t believe what they want to believe privately, but Trump really moved a tonne of people to just say ‘hey we have to believe in individual rights, we have to believe in freedom’. But we’re now at a point where we’re rehashing all of these things. Suddenly, we’re talking about all of this LGBT stuff again and the simple truth is that everyone has equality in America, as is promised by America. But these people can’t be satisfied, nothing is good enough for them—they want to find problems even when problems don’t exist. The fact is that Donald Trump did not care about anyone’s sexuality, he does not care about someone’s gender or skin colour. What the guy cares about is do you work hard? Are you successful? Are you interesting? I think he wants to share the system that has been so good to him, he wants to share that opportunity with other people.

Clarence Henderson said that Trump is not a politician but a leader, and where politicians are a dime a dozen, leaders are priceless. Isn’t this even more true when you consider what he did in the Middle East? 

Yes, I agree. He [Trump] has an innate sense of doing what’s right and going against the grain—that’s what a true leader is. We don’t really need a politician. I mean, Joe Biden is a politician, and he sort of stands for nothing. He will say anything and reverse on any number of things he said 20 years ago. I don’t even think he’s really in charge, but he is still the one that they put out there to read speeches (even if he doesn’t read them very well). It is just fairly obvious that this is not a leader who’s leading the country. He’s never said to the American people that ‘this is the direction that the country should go, and I am here for everybody’. They tried to make it seem like Trump was this crazily divisive president, but he wasn’t. He was constantly saying let’s compromise, and he brought immigration proposals to the Democrats that they just walked away from. He was constantly talking about record low black unemployment and Hispanic unemployment and they treated him horribly for that. They created an imaginary character in their mind about him. That is not who he was.

The way they treated Trump is the same way they treated Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, and Boris Johnson to an extent. It’s a repeated pattern, Dave!

They hate those who want to create the conditions to free the people. That is what those leaders you mentioned have in common. It doesn’t mean that all their policies are correct, but they are people who deeply care about their country and are trying to fight the forces of collectivism and communism and the deeply corrupt mainstream media. That’s not easy.

Through the work of James Lindsay, you answer a question that many are asking—if the ideas of postmodernism have been around for a long time, what has made them such a  dominant force within our culture?

Communism, socialism, and collectivism keep coming back but will always fail. A collectivist system wants us all to behave in the same predetermined way. Its kryptonite, the biggest wrench in the machine, is the individual. That’s why communism, which promises tolerance and equity, always ends up killing an awful lot of people. While these ideas have been festering for a long time, James has been leading the fight on the sort of academic level to expose where these ideas have come from and how they march through the institutions. What happened in the last 10 years was that they put it on steroids by taking advantage of an entire generation of young people who were fooled with participation trophies into believing that everyone is equal, that hard work doesn’t matter, and that the system is corrupt. Armed with all of these things, these kids got into college and basically ruined the universities. They crumbled under the weight of wokeism. The liberals all folded, which is why there are no sensible liberals in America anymore, they're all moderate conservatives which is what I am. The other part that’s a little hard to fully quantify is the big tech part, the likes and the retweets and Tumblr and all of these things that made this activist class that was you know anonymous online and grew up with the internet it all made it seem I think much bigger than it probably actually is yeah and we still haven’t fully figured out how to grapple with that.

Yeonmi Park has said that North Koreans are not rebelling against oppression because they don’t know they are oppressed. Many Americans now never experienced absolute freedom of expression, to them restrictive PC culture is the norm…

Yes, and it’s a very scary proposition because this idea that you wouldn’t even know you are oppressed, because the oppression has gone on for so long. You know, after the civil war when slavery was made illegal, there were slaves who stayed on the plantations. You can become a hostage in your own thoughts and it’s not even your fault it’s the system that you are operating within. 

You talk about “the elusive, tenuous God-shaped hole” that most people ignore or numb with drugs. It seems there is certainly a growing search for God and spirituality within our society.

This is what Nietzsche warned of when he said that God is dead. People thought he meant ‘oh, we’re free now we’ve killed the superstition of God’, but he meant it as a warning, that if you take that away it’s going to be replaced by something, and I think it’s very obvious that it’s been replaced in America by an occult-like ideology that believes it could rule us all. 

This is what horrific wars and genocides are about. Many Jews unfortunately have become some of the leaders of the secular work movement, they’ve traded in all of their beliefs and all of their traditions for a new set of beliefs, but they do it in the name of non-belief, that’s the irony. 

Jews are in a unique place to fix a lot of this because even though there are a lot of secular woke Jews, there are also a lot of really sane Jews fighting this thing whether it’s Dennis Prager or Ben Shapiro or me, or the voices that are fighting in Israel.