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debunkingtherightwing · 4 months

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The profound laziness of Dave Rubin

No, but you posting a video about it for clicks is. (source: Rubin Report on YouTube)

Dave Rubin is a pretty regular source of truly insane and stupid takes and today is no exception. This was the episode he put out on January 31st and as usual it breaks new ground in the realm of stupidity. Lets get into it.

Dave starts off by declaring the theme of todays episode, or lack thereof.

01:24, Dave Rubin: "The theme of todays show is there's an awful lot happening in the world right now. This WW3 situation seems like it's ramping up a bit. I'm gonna try to cool the jets as everyone loves talking about 'Oh my god WW3 is happening and oh my god the civil war is happening and oh my god the alien invasion is happening.' Sometimes, maybe we can have some calmer heads prevail so we'll do a little bit of that. But what I wanted to start with that'll kind of prime everything is that Jon Stewart-"

Brief pause, so what's the theme? If the theme is WW3 related stuff, how on earth is Jon Stewart even remotely related to that?

01:51, Dave Rubin: "Jon Stewart, I guess former comedian. I don't know what we call him at this point, he's basically a progressive activist now."

"Yeah, imagine being a former comedian who became a political activist. Man, I can't even imagine. That's so sick."

First of all, the sheer lack of self awareness is stunning. Second of all, watch that video in full if you want to get an idea of the sheer lack of talent that Dave brings to the table. It's three minutes of Dave being a complete moron constantly trying to do crowd work and getting absolutely no laughs out of anyone.

02:18, Dave Rubin: "Jon Stewart left the Daily Show, what was it? About six years or so ago. Ends up bringing a new show, The Problem With Jon Stewart onto Apple TV and he just goes all in on the crazy leftism."

Jon Stewart is back at the Daily Show for a limited time and Dave Rubin isn't gonna take it! He's only hosting on Monday nights to cover things related to the election cycle.

Jon Stewart was always a pretty big leftist. Here's him absolutely demolishing fellow blog favorite Tucker Carlson all the way back in 2004. I can't help but feel a tinge of jealousy in Dave's coverage of Jon. Jon also stood up for his free speech, something that Dave should love, by walking away from his show on Apple TV when they told him he couldn't talk about AI and China.

Dave doesn't even understand the most basic facts about this story...like the fact that Jon isn't the only person hosting the Daily Show or the fact that they are making more than the Monday episode.

02:30, Dave Rubin: "But the machine is bringing him back now, putting him back at the Daily Show at the chair on a weekly show not a daily show. So the Daily Show's going to weekly, alright they're going to struggle with that."

Here's what happened, Dave read some headline somewhere about Jon Stewart returning to the Daily Show and instead of trying to learn the facts about the story that he's trying to cover, he just barged in and started talking about it on his show.

If Dave actually read about what he's trying to talk about the subject he's talking about, he'd know that Jon is only hosting on Monday’s and that other people are hosting the show on all the other days of the week. It's also only for the election cycle.

Dave plays some clips of CBS for him to react to.

03:36, Dave Rubin: "We're doing PR, we're owned by the same people and we have to tell you he's really great. Yeah, ok! So you guys get how the whole machine works, right? There's no reason for CBS News to be covering that on their nightly news program."

At the end of the clip he plays, the reporter discloses that CBS and Comedy Central are both owned by Paramount, in short disclosing the conflict of interest. Should they have maybe not covered this? Yeah, I wouldn't have because it's a conflict of interest. But they did disclose it.

03:51, Dave Rubin: "And the damn shame about Jon Stewart and we'll illustrate this in just a moment is that at least for the first couple of years at the Daily Show he was doing something kind of new and poking and prodding at the media the way I kinda do on this show."

Dave Rubin and Jon Stewart have one key difference; Jon is funny and insightful and Dave is well....Dave.

04:07, Dave Rubin: "He's sort of gone off the deep end, or I don't even need to qualify that, he has completely gone off the deep end when it comes to progressive politics and I would say become everything that he probably once despised."

Just to recap some of Dave's career; Dave started off at the Young Turks, a progressive news outlet, and ended up starting a conservative news show after leaving the Young Turks. His sudden pivot to conservativism coincidentally dovetailed with receiving money from the Koch Brothers.

So who has became everything they once despised here?

Dave plays a clip of Jon confronting a Republican attorney general about gender affirming care for minors. If I were Dave I really wouldn't have played that clip as Jon does a really good job dismantling the Attorney Generals arguments. Dave does cut the clip and this was his takeaway.

06:51, Dave Rubin: "And it goes on and on, what an absolutely smug unlikeable person he became for the cool one million plus per episode he was making on that now defunct show."

More of Dave describing himself. Seriously, take some time to watch a Dave Rubin episode if you have time. He talks in this really slow and condescending way that's near unbearable to listen to.

07:10, Dave Rubin: "Jon Stewart, if you are watching this you might want to read Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, thank you, who wrote an incredible book about how so much of what's happening to our children is a social contagion. Particularly when it comes to young girls thinking they can transition and become young boys."

Abigail Shrier is one of those right-wing grifters who has made a cottage industry of spreading misinformation about transgender youth. Blog favorite and professional sociopath Matt Walsh is another example of that. Shriers book is filled with massive amounts of misinformation and outright falsehoods.

Also, the idea of Jon Stewart even knowing of Dave Rubin's existence is laughable. You just know if Jon stepped foot on Dave's set, Dave would be tripping over himself to get Jon a beer and a pillow for his feet.

08:04, Dave Rubin: "No you cannot take a boy and actually make them a girl, that's just not reality."

Say it with me; absolutely nobody is giving transgender surgeries to small children. Dave's entire framework is simply denying the existence of transgender people.

I've said this before but I find the fact that Dave is a member of the LGBTQ community and still has hopped onto the right-wing transphobia bandwagon really infuriating. Years ago his ilk would be trying to make his marriage illegal and guess what? They still want that! It's so frustrating to watch this guy run defense for guys who hate who he is.

And talk about "smug and unlikeable". Dave hasn't even bothered to meet up with the families of trans youth like Jon has and is handwaving legitimate medical treatments because "my billionaire sponsors don't like it".

Anyway, lets move on before my head explodes. Dave plays another Jon Stewart clip, this time him interviewing Gavin Newsom. Dave then plays some clips from the Daily Show when Trevor Noah was hosting it. Dave proceeds to call a transwoman a "creature" and I want to throw my laptop out the window. I'll elaborate on this in the conclusion, but I'm starting to realize that Dave Rubin is a profoundly lazy content creator.

14:22, Dave Rubin: "Now the reason I'm showing you all this and starting the show with this Jon Stewart thing and everything else is because the Daily Show became this cultural touchpoint. 'More young people get their news from the Daily Show than anywhere else.' So when you wonder how did this all happen? That so many kids are confused about their gender. How did it happen that being not racist made you racist? It's because this is the crap that Hollywood pushes on us."

"The Daily Show is turning people trans" is an argument that I never thought I would hear and yet here we are. The median viewership age of the Daily Show in 2024 is 63 years old by the way so this argument makes even less sense in this day and age.

Dave plays another Daily Show clip. This time it's one of the guest hosts talking about migrants.

15:54, Dave Rubin: "Illegal people are here illegally. Even if there are jobs for them then what you do is you have them come legally and you figure it out."

Except that the pathways to legal immigration are borderline impossible to fulfill. If Dave is saying that we should loosen those pathways, I agree. But that's not what he's saying so this is just him being an obtuse idiot.

Dave does an ad for Tax Network USA and then he expands on his broader point.

18:10, Dave Rubin: "What I'm trying to lay out to you, and that's all well and good, is that all the ideas that we just talked about there are the things that get into the culture and you wonder why everything is wrong, why our politicians suck, why we don't know up is down and up is up and down is down and all these things."

Dave Rubin: Master Orator strikes again.

"Up is down and up is up and down is down", truly profound stuff right there. Seriously, who the hell watches this unironically?! How does this guy have 2.14M subscribers?! At least guys like Ben Shapiro have certain airs around them that make them seem like intellectuals to people who don't know any better.

18:25, Dave Rubin: "But now I want to drive this a little further into the cultural piece of this because Law & Order where a white woman is raped by a black man but doesn't want him to go to jail. Take a look at this."

Dave then plays the clip from Law & Order. Again, this a ridiculously stupid thing to talk about, especially since Dick Wolf seems like a pretty conservative guy from what I can tell.

19:40, Dave Rubin: "Could we do a road trip after the show? Would you guys be interested in doing a road trip after the show? Drive cross-country, go to Hollywood, bomb the place?"

Law & Order has been filmed in New York for a million years.

Also, the episode ends with the rape victim testifying against the rapist so this whole story is a complete load of nothing even if we follow the parameters that Dave laid out.

20:11, Dave Rubin: "The messaging that they are sending to the brains of young people and I guess middle age people who watch Law & Order, everything is freaking backwards. They have taken art and made it activism."

Does....does Dave not realize that art and film has been a form of activism since its inception. Also, I love how he realized in the middle of his sentence that young people tend not to watch Law & Order and threw that "middle aged people" in there at the last second. Nice save.

Dave talks about the Disney Snow White remake. This is such an insanely old story. Ben Shapiro even announced a "competitor" version that will be hosted on the Daily Wire what feels like a century ago. Old news and an immediate skip.

21:21, Dave Rubin: "I do wanna back up for just a second. I don't condone or call for terrorism in Hollywood or anywhere else. I didn't mean bomb the place, I meant like glitterbomb it, you know what I mean? Just go there and pour glitter all over these people, that is what I meant. Lets be clear about that because Media Matters I'm sure is watching every moment of this 'Rubin just called to bomb Hollywood.'"

I've got bad news for Dave, he's not even important enough to get clipped by Media Matters. He's been mentioned by them in passing but the last time he got clipped was February of 2023. Really the only people criticizing him are a Twitter account called "Dave Rubin Clips" on Twitter, his own subreddit, and me.

Dave plays a clip from SNL. He does an ad for the Wellness Company, it's the same company that makes those emergency kits that Charlie Kirk was hawking in our last episode.

Now, its time to get serious. Dave wants to talk about the news...it involves playing more stupid freaking clips. He plays an MSNBC clip and here are his thoughts.

26:11, Dave Rubin: "Ok, I'm only showing you that because these people that they put on there, they just offer them the red meat. And of course their kind of brain damaged progressive audience eats it up."

"And then I play a clip of it so that my audience can eat up my commentary on it"

Also, the brain damaged comment was stupid as all hell. Anyway, Trump lost the defamation suit against E. Jean Carroll and Dave comments on it the only way he can...by commenting on a clip he plays from The View.

28:13, Dave Rubin: "It really, it's so horrible. And watching the women applaud. If they all felt like this woman really got raped, again rape is pretty bad, they wouldn't be celebrating today, right? Like, it wouldn't be a day of celebration. It would be kind of a somber like, 'Oh there was a verdict in the defamation thing related to the rape and Donald Trumps gonna have to pay up.' But they know it's all bullshit, it's all a show."

"Woah, a rape victim celebrating finally getting justice?! That makes no sense!"

This argument makes absolutely zero sense. Imagine if you got raped and the court forces your rapist to pay you millions of dollars. You'd be pretty damn happy. Does Dave think that after you get raped you are incapable of feeling anything outside of sadness?! And what's more, if you manage to score a win against your rapist you are still going to be sad.

Lets play a game. Do you think that Dave is going to;

A): Offer insightful and nuanced commentary on the verdict that considers the evidence and leads to an informed conclusion.

B): Play another stupid clip and then say something stupid.

The answer is A....just kidding! This is Dave Rubin we're talking about, of course it's going to be B! Dave rolls a CNN clip and mumbles about some stupid shit.

30:20, Dave Rubin: "If she got raped, which Donald Trump was not convicted of, would you want to make a show of all of this?"

The guy was extremely wealthy and that was before he became president. She's celebrating getting a form of justice against an extremely powerful adversary.

Also, Trump was found liable of sexually abusing Carroll which is commonly understood as rape. So he didn't even get that part right. Again, laziness.

Dave comments on a joke Carroll made to Rachel Maddow that she would "buy her a penthouse". It was a joke and apparently Dave is pissed about it. Whatever. Dave plays more clips of Carroll and then plays a Megyn Kelly clip. Again, letting others make his arguments for him.

35:16, Dave Rubin: "This is why Megyn is just so consistently great. I don't know what happened, you don't know what happened, Megyn Kelly doesn't know what happened."

So the bar for trusting a rape victim is if you know for sure what happened? That's ridiculous! Plus the evidence was clearly compelling enough that Trump was found liable for sexual abuse.

Also, wasn't the theme for today supposed to be about WW3? "Cooler heads shall prevail" and all that?

37:03, Dave Rubin: "But now I wanna connect that to something that's happening in the world and show you Trump at his absolute best. Because these are the moments that we could use a real leader in this country and I think he has an interesting opportunity. And as I've been telling you for the last two weeks, I wanna nudge him to be the best Donald Trump if possible."

Oh yeah, that's gonna happen. I can just see Trump now;

"I was gonna make this decision but Dave Rubin said that would be a bad idea! Guess I'm not gonna do that!"

Anyway, Dave's next story is about the drone-strike in Jordan that took the lives of 3 US soldiers. He reads some stuff from the Daily Wires website (and here I thought he was going to play a clip of Ben Shapiro, he's evolving!) and then launches into his take;

38:44, Dave Rubin: "So now you might be wondering 'Dave, what does this have to do with the E. Jean Carroll thing?' Well, Donald Trump issued a statement on this and I think he nailed it."

Dave reads out a Donald Trump post that he very clearly didn't write (not enough random all caps). Again, Dave can't really make content of his own capably and just relies on everybody else to do the heavy lifting. Also, I love how quickly he switched over from being a Ronnie D simp to being a MAGA moron. Those boots need a lickin'!

40:20, Dave Rubin: "Look, I don't know if Donald Trump wrote that himself. It's obviously irrelevant, they have speechwriters and everything else."

It's relevant when you spent the past four minutes hyping this post up as "the Trump we need" and "Trump at his absolute best". If Trump didn't write it then it isn't Trump. Unless you are saying that Trump is at his best when he isn't in control, in which case me and Dave might have more common ground than I thought.

40:26, Dave Rubin: "But the clarity, the moral clarity, 'peace through strength'. The reality of the fact that three, four years ago, when Donald Trump was still president, especially pre-COVID, that the world was peaceful and Middle East peace deals were being signed left and right. The Iranians were doing absolutely nothing."

It may have seemed more peaceful compared to right now but it's important to remember that the conflict between Israel and Palestine has been going on for way longer than October 7th. The Abraham Accords, which I assume is what Dave is talking about when he mentions about peace deals, was brokered between countries that weren't engaged in conflict and did nothing to impact Israel and Palestine. Also, nothing happened with Iran? Remember the assassination of General Suleimani that nearly pushed the US and Iran to the brink of war? That certainly didn't help peace in Iran.

41:30, Dave Rubin: "The first thing that Donald Trump did when he got into office was drop the mother of all bombs, the MOAB, the mother of all bombs, dropped it. People didn't even know why he dropped it but it made it seem like he was kinda crazy so don't mess with this guy."

So Dave's brilliant foreign policy strategy is acting like a complete lunatic?

41:43, Dave Rubin: "He killed Suleimani, right? And everyone was like 'this is gonna start World War Three', actually it caused Iran to not do much of anything while he was president."

The reason we are seeing so much action from Iran is because of Israel/Palestine, a conflict which finally boiled over after decades. Blaming Irans increased action on Biden is stupid.

Again, I don't think Biden is faultless. His continued funding of the genocide in Palestine is awful and I fundamentally disagree with it. But criticizing him for stupid made up reasons is well...stupid.

Conclusion:

Ok, so Dave playing a lot of clips and not adding a lot of original ideas to his commentary took me off guard the last time that I talked about him but this time I was ready for it. This episode didn't break a lot of new ground but I felt that it would be a good opportunity to talk about something about Dave that needs to be said and it's that his content is so deeply lazy.

Think about it. Your average Dave Rubin episode is just him playing television clips completely out of context and then saying a two second conservative culture war related soundbite after it. Dave Rubin basically gets mad at TV for a living.

Even when he's trying to make an argument, he just mumbles something that doesn't really make any sense and then lets someone more articulate like Megyn Kelly pick up the pieces. It's to the point where I would be willing to wager that a good 50% of his show is just clips of other people talking.

This is because Dave Rubin is a grifter who doesn't really bring any new ideas to the table outside of "I'm gay and I'm also conservative". I feel like a big part of him realizes that when he talks for long periods of time he usually ends up making a fool of himself.

And it's not just the clips either, he barely researches what he's talking about. Take for example, the Daily Show coverage. With a five second Google search I knew more about the story than Dave did and as a result was able to point out his inaccuracies and make him look like a complete idiot. Same thing with him not realizing that Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. This is basic shit that you need to know when you are trying to act like the authority on a subject. But Dave doesn't even look into it because he's too busy clipping NBC and being deeply lazy.

Anyway, cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

#right wing bullshit #politics #conservative bullshit #fact checking #journalism #bad takes #conservatives #disinformation #debunking #dave rubin #right wing disinformation #right wing stupidity #fuck transphobes

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erdarielthewhumper · 2 years

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Hey, just wondering, where is your profile pic from? I absolutely love it! 😍

Oh thank you!

It's from an old tv show I quite like called Robin of Sherwood, from s1e6 "The King's Fool", and that's Robin of Loxley who has just been punched in the face by King Richard Lionheart (spoiler alert, but Richard's not a super good guy and his return fixes nothing in this show. And then he goes to war to Normandy again and dies there offscreen during the second season)

Here's another screencap from the same scene so you can appreciate what a pretty boy Michael Praed's Robin of Loxley was 😆

This is from another episode (also the quality of the picture isn't great, sorry), but it seemed relevant to add here :P

(More abt the show and its contents in terms of whump under the cut. It gets pretty rambly, and I'm sorry about that, you just asked me about something I really really like so I can't help but ramble about a lot of things about it that you never asked)

Now, the show's actually not super whumpy, because it was a family-friendly show that aired in 1984-1986, which apparently meant that you can have a character (not Robin) give a backstory exposition rant about how his wife was raped and murdered and he's in jail waiting execution for killing three of the men that did it (okay, he did not use the word "rape", specifically, the phrasing was "Soldiers. Drunk. Mercenaries. They took her from me. And when they'd finished with her, they trampled her to death with their horses." but I don't think that makes it any better) but god forbid you show blood on-screen when people get hurt. Like, with Robin of Sherwood, it's a pretty good indicator that the injury is not super serious or dangerous if there's blood, if someone gets killed you never see blood.

And honestly, the show kind of tends to avoid injuring the main characters super seriously most of the time. Various outlaws get possessed/mind-controlled to turn against their friends from time to time, but even then it's not super angsty most of the time and people usually don't get badly hurt. And the villains obviously don't tend to get to truly hurting them.

To be fair, I don't know how much of that comes from it being a family-friendly show, and how much comes from the writers being aware of the fact that you can't injure the characters super badly before it gets to a point where it would kill them or permanently disable them since they're a bunch of medieval outlaws living in the forest and don't have access to medical care (the show has magic, tho, and there's a character who's somewhere between "very powerful wizard" and "a straight-up minor god" in power level who sorta watches over Robin and the crew and does create some deus ex machina interventions on occasion, but you can't use that to heal the characters too many times before it gets stupid, either)

So yeah, there's more angst really than there's characters getting physically hurt, and there's not all that much angst there either. Although for its own time, it apparently was relatively dark and serious take on Robin Hood, and like, it's not a comedy or anything by today's standards either. The episodes vary a bit in style and seriousness (and quite frankly, quality too, although most of them are fun enough to watch), and while there's a few two-parters, it's pretty episodic, there's some basic continuity (although actually for continuity, some of the episodes should be watched in a different order than they originally aired in, but other fans have done the work to order them in a way that makes more sense continuity-wise and you can find those fan-recommended watching orders online if you're curious) but there aren't really any big overarching plots really.

Like I already said, the show has magic and fantasy elements, it's not a purely traditional Robin Hood in that sense. How much there's fantasy depends on the episode, and it tends to come up mostly in the form of new villains who appear in just one or two episodes, the Sheriff of Nottingham gets tangled up in the magic stuff sometimes too but usually he's not the main threat in the magic-focused episodes. And there's some episodes that don't have magic or where magic is more in the background that have one-off villains too. So overall, the amount of episodes where the main conflict is between the outlaws and the Sheriff and those under his direct command remains pretty low.

Which I would say really ends up working in the show's favor, since it helps the Sheriff's character retain his credibility as a capable villain worthy of being taken seriously. As does the fact that even in most of the episodes where the conflict is directly between the outlaws and the Sheriff, the outlaws' goal isn't to kill or overthrow the Sheriff, and killing or capturing Robin and the outlaws usually is secondary to the Sheriff, like it would be nice but it's not the absolute main goal he's striving to achieve, so it's possible to write some of the episodes in a way where both parties manage to achieve the goal that was most important to them. Like I just personally really appreciate it, because in episodic shows like this, when you have a regular villain, it's really easy to end up writing it in a way where since the heroes must always win at least enough to keep their lives and their freedom, the villain always loses and therefore ends up losing all their credibility to a point where it's hard to take them seriously anymore. So writing it like that, where they're not the only villain in the show, and even when they are the main villain of the episode, most of the time it's possible for both sides to win some and lose some, is just a really great way to avoid having that.

Now, "is Robin of Sherwood good, or do I just like it?" is a harder question to answer. (Also a question you didn't ask, I know, but I feel like it's worth answering.) It depends a lot from episode to episode, but I would argue that as the kind of show it was intended to be (that is, fun fantasy adventure, intended as entertainment first and foremost) it is very good! It definitely fills that purpose. Plus, it's one of those shows that pretty much the whole cast genuinely enjoyed doing (to be fair, who wouldn't like to be given a cool costume and a sword or a bow and arrows and be sent to forest to play epic heroes and devious villains?), and that enthusiasm does shine through to the finished thing, just adding that little bit of magic that nothing else really does.

It doesn't necessarily win any points for originality on most of the plots, especially the more fantasy-heavy tend to be somewhat predictable, and like I said, the quality does vary from episode to episode, some of them I really love and some of them I hardly ever rewatch. But then again I doubt that originality was ever the goal for those episodes, and I honestly don't mind a predictable or even cliche plot as long as it's an entertaining one. Some of the special effects they use seem a liiiittle bit outdated, but hey, it's an 80s tv-show, what do you expect? And honestly, there's not that many effects that stick out even then, CGI in early 2000s tv shows sometimes sticks out more often and worse. And yeah, it does also in some of its themes and elements carry the biases of its time so there's things that wouldn't be considered right if a tv show did them today, but as far as I can tell, it's not really any better or worse than most other stuff from the same era.

So I would say that if you like, say, BBC Merlin, or that sort of episodic fantasy or adventure show, you're probably gonna like Robin of Sherwood!

#robin of sherwood

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