Dave Rubin > Quotes

“Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” In other words, today’s progressives have now become the sexists and racists they’ve claimed to hate.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Trust me, beaut fades, but dumb is forever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“It’s no coincidence that social justice warriors are frequently out of shape, poorly dressed, and have messy hair, along with their overall disheveled appearance. If some dress for success, they dress for failure.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, rationalizing Islamic terror had become a progressive position. According to progressives, it was another 2-D argument: brown people = good, white people = bad.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’ve reluctantly reached after years of watching my old “team” transform into a baying mob of hysterical puritans—a feral gang that sows division through identity politics and encourages societal tribes to rank themselves in a pecking order of “oppression.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Thomas Sowell nailed it when he said: “No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“This is because outward virtue signaling is separate from being a considerate, moral person. Whereas the latter is central for common decency (and is something we should all strive for), the former is just a display of faux morality. One that’s designed to offer protection from the mob ever turning on them. It’s a protection racket—a form of insurance. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.” T”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“So yes, saying “I don’t know” is a good thing. Bullshitting your way through life is not dignified and over time it can never really work. Eventually people see through it and then are very likely to second-guess everything else you say going forward.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m a free-speech absolutist. Yes, even when it comes to opinions I find abhorrent. In fact, specifically when it comes to those opinions. The only exceptions to this rule have already been specified by the Supreme Court of the United States: calling for direct violence against a person or specific group, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater (with the intent to incite iminent lawless action), and defaming somebody through libel or slander. Everything else should get a free pass, every single time. No exceptions, ever.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“As he noted in The Daily Signal, children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also more likely to live in poverty-stricken households. Conversely, nuclear families—whether black or white—are richer in all ways.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Segregating Americans into identity groups—the very essence of bigotry—has been fully embraced by modern progressivism, which has absolutely nothing to do with classical liberalism”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“I’m black—not African American. That’s a term I don’t like. I was born in America and I’ve never been to Africa. It’s an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It’s ridiculous.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Everyone pays the same, that 18 percent, except a tiny bit more for those at the top, along with a bit of relief for those at the bottom. In a perfect world I’d do the 18 percent tax across the board, but perhaps a classical liberal is just a guilty libertarian. As it stands right now, the top 1 percent already pay 90 percent of the money generated through federal tax, while the lower 10 percent pay basically nothing—yet still we’re told the rich need to pay more. This is nothing but class warfare, which is good for votes, but bad for policy. And if the”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“If one person speaks the language of conservatives and the other speaks the language of progressives, the chances that they will engage with each other on the level of facts are low.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“progressives see racism, sexism, and discrimination everywhere, except where it actually exists.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“This knowledge is power and you should be empowered, especially when it comes to politicians who will say anything to get your vote.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“But instead of contributing to the conversation like a grown-up, he basically shouted Harris and Maher down and called them racists, which has now become a standard debating tactic for most progressives.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“… the root of our gun problem isn’t the weapon itself but the human beings behind them. After all, it’s a person who pulls the trigger. If you think this isn’t relevant, it may be worth noting that one of the Columbine, Colorado, shooters, Eric Harris, had Luvox (a Prozac-like, psychotropic medicine) in his bloodstream. Likewise, Stephen Paddock, the man who slaughtered fifty-eight people in the Las Vegas shooting—the worst in modern American history—had antianxiety medication in his system and had previously been prescribed diazepam. Meanwhile, Parkland, Florida, shooter, Nikolas Cruz, had been on psychotropic drugs before he embarked on his killing spree as well. These are facts. Yet we still allow mind-altering medication to be advertised on television, even though their side effects produce all sorts of problems, such as suicidal tendencies, anxiety, and insomnia. I’m no expert on prescription medicine or mental health, but perhaps focusing on these elements could be a sane place for the debate to go. After all, it maintains our Second Amendment freedoms without ignoring some pivotal factors.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Think about yourself right now. Do you represent all white people, or black people, or straight people, or gay people? No, of course not. You only represent yourself. Segregating Americans into identity groups—the very essence of bigotry—has been fully embraced by modern progressivism, which has absolutely nothing to do with classical liberalism. Progressivism has traded a love of individual rights for paternalistic, insincere concern for the collective. It judges people based upon their skin color, gender, and sexuality, thus imagining them as competitors in an Oppression Olympics in which victimhood is virtue.”
― Dave Rubin, Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“the left is now characterized by a weird form of self-flagellation.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Fortunately, this all happened in the alternative reality of Twitter, where such things are posted by anonymous accounts with anime avatars.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“This article also flirted with libel by claiming I was “far right” (read: shorthand for Nazi) because I had the temerity to interview people with different views. Truly hateful, I know.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

“Kling’s point is that no matter what language we speak, we should use slow thinking, not fast thinking. Citing Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kling argues that we go wrong in political discourse when we hear a fact in isolation and jump to conclusions without considering its context. He encourages us to consider political problems slowly and logically instead—much like Elder did in our 2016 interview.”
― Dave Rubin, Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason