Men's Work & Safety Footwear





Be ready to work in the roughest of conditions with this very durable boot from Timberland PRO This silhouette uses a composite safety toe in the forefoot to shield you from harm Complete with a rubber toe cap to add extra durability It's got an ExoSpine™ heel counter in the back that gives you a complete lock-down feel with an ASTM certified design to help protect you from any electrical hazards The upper is a full grain waterproof leather It's going to help shield you from any outside debris especially with that gusseted tongue using an easy corded lace-up with plastic eyelets to give it a customizable and secure fit The inside lining is moisture-wicking and odor-wicking keep you feeling fresh and secure with all that padding using a very comfortable step propelled foam footbed in the bottom that's made with dual density anti-fatigue technology that helps absorb shock allowing you to stand longer for hours at a time It is Goodyear® welt across the forefoot there to give it extra stability and durability Complete with a fiberglass shank on the inside for extra stable support The outsole is Vibram® Fire & Ice rubber giving it extra grip with its oil and slip resistance It's going to be great for any temperature, gripping any ice, giving you plenty of traction and it stands up to heat as well Keep yourself secure and shielded from harm when you're working in these safety boots from Timberland PRO This silhouette has a composite safety toe there in the forefoot to help protect you from any harm and it uses the ASTM certified design to protect you from any electrical hazards as well The upper is made out of a waterproof leather with Ever-Guard™ technology to give you a very abrasion resistant and secure feel Complete with a gusseted tongue to keep you feeling dry The inside lining is also moisture-wicking with some extra padding there to keep you feeling great and it has an external heel counter there in the back all the way up the back of the heel to make sure you're always secure when you're working There's a foam footbed in the bottom there that's made with dual density anti-fatigue technology so you can stand on your feet for long hours at a time using a Goodyear welt construction across the middle Add extra durability and a long lifespan to the boot It has a triple ribbed steel shank on the inside for some extra support and balance while the outsole is the durable Vibram® Fire & Ice outsole that has lots of traction and durability with oil and slip resistant as well as non-marking to keep you protected on wet and very hot situations - One of the hearings I chaired, we had testimony from a guy named Dr. Epstein. - Oh yeah, I know about it. - And he's a psychologist, used to be the editor of Psychology Today. He's an academic, he's by the way, not a conservative, he's a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and openly supported Hillary Clinton. And he did empirical research on Google's manipulative search outcomes. So it's interesting psychology. When you type in a search, the auto-correct, the auto fill in not the auto-correct, but what automatically populates makes a huge difference. And the first few stories that come up make a huge difference. And there was a dramatic differential between when you typed in Hillary Clinton, it would auto-populate good things. - [Dave] Yeah, all good things, yeah. - When you typed in Donald Trump, it would auto-populate bad things. And the stories that would come up would be predominantly good stories for Hillary, predominantly bad stories for Trump. And what was interesting is Dr. Epstein did the study and he concluded that in 2016, Google's deceptive search outcomes shifted 2.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton. And he said this as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but he was horrified, but he also projected, he said in 2015, he said, big tech is getting worse. It's getting more aggressive. They could move as many as 15 million votes to the Democrats in 2020. And so I think it's a huge threat. (soft upbeat music) - I'm Dave Rubin, and this is the Rubin report. Quick reminder everybody to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click that notification bell so that you maybe just maybe actually see our videos in your feed. And joining me today is a Republican Senator from Texas, the cohost of the Verdict podcast and a man who uses almost as many Star Wars references on Twitter as I do, Senator Ted Cruz, welcome to the Rubin Report. - Dave it's great to be with you. And I will say I'm learning already as you start with telling people to subscribe on your feed. So I'm a much newer YouTuber and podcaster. And so that is good tutelage. - Yes, well I'm going to need you in the Senate to fight the battles that I have been fighting on YouTube for quite some time. All right, so we're obviously gonna get into big tech. I also should mention we're dressed virtually exactly the same, which is a little weird, but you've brought the-- - Well and look at the-- - Texas boots. - I told you, we need to, these are Lucchese Ostrich which are tough to beat, and I've had these resoled several times, but they're good. All right, here's something interesting. We were talking a minute ago about how you grew up in New York. Do you know where I started wearing cowboy boots? - Well, I'm gonna guess New York for some reason, or maybe Jersey. - New Jersey. - Why Jersey, Jersey, cowboy boots what. - It's a weird story. So I grew up in Houston and in Houston, but I was, as a sort of junior high and high school kid, I was kind of a preppy kid for a while. Had long hair, had a spike for a while. I mean, went through these different phases, but I was a city boy. And so I didn't wear boots in school growing up. And then I went to college at Princeton in New Jersey and I was 17 and I was away from home and I just got homesick. And so I said, all right, I'm gonna go buy a pair of boots. And it was sort of a way for a 17 year old to kind of hold onto your home. And so I started wearing boots as a freshmen in college and I've worn them ever since, but it took going to New Jersey, which is a little ridiculous to start wearing boots. - So you were basically the Texas boots guy at Princeton university. - So I remember I had a car that my grandfather had given me, it was a '78 Ford Fairmont. We called it the green balm. And I remember digging that car out of the snow using the heel of my boots, which by the way doesn't work very well, but really like bad idea. But as a Texas teenager, I didn't know anybody. We got it out, but it was... - But here we are. All right, moving on from boots for a moment. The one other important thing that we have to get to before all the issues, the beard situation. Because I think like me, you've now become more beard than man at this point. Something happened when, how long you've had the beard? About like a year and a half maybe? - Yeah year and a half. - Something like that? - So it was Thanksgiving, two years ago. - Okay, so about two years. Something happened to me when I got the beard which was about three years ago or so, I sensed the change in me. Do you sense that change? You seem to have gotten a little more feisty on Twitter since the beard. Is there a connection? - There's a little bit of just kind of screw it. I mean that, all right, so what prompted? Why did you get the beard? - I go off the grid every August. I shut down, no phone, no TV, nothing, no news. And it's, I've done it for three years. I'm about to do it in a couple of weeks. And the first time I did it, I just decided not to shave. I came back, everybody said they loved the beard. And then it took over like black Spiderman. I know you're also a video comic book guy, yeah. - So actually my beard story is very much the same. It was Thanksgiving. I mean, holidays, I never shave. And so I would always try to grow a little bit of stubble during holidays. And it just kind of over Thanksgiving, I said, all right, pack with it. I'm not gonna shave it. It was not, there was no profound statement. It was just kind of like this'll be interesting. - And then Twitter likes it and you pretty much have to bow to the mob. - The guy who runs my political operation, he emailed me when I came back and his email was like, worst idea ever! So I had to be like, alright to heck with you. Then I'm definitely keeping it. - Yeah, you're also a Simpson's guy. I mean, we could do every reference, basically every '80s and '90s reference, we could just set aside politics and do that the whole time. - I don't think I've seen Twitter get more angry than when I said a couple of years ago that I thought every character but Lisa Simpson was right of center. That Homer, Marge, Bart and Maggie are all conservatives and libertarians and Lisa is the self righteous leftist. And what was interesting, look I was mostly just kind of riffing, but the Twitter world went nuts. Like they could not handle and they're like, don't try understand Lisa's the hero. And I'm like, yeah, except she's self-righteous and criticizing everyone and a pain in the ass. Look, Homer is every man. I mean, he's... - He's basically a libertarian, right? - Bart clearly is a libertarian rebel. I mean that, Maggie, do you remember the episode "Maggie is in the Ayn Rand School for Tots", and then they do the greatest skate music and she escapes from it. So I'm calling Maggie, and by the way, Maggie is also a gun owner. Cause she shot Mr. Burns. So and then all right, Merge is-- - Yeah, So Marge that's the tough one here. - But look, Marge is-- - She's traditional. - She's traditional. She's the anchor of the family. She keeps everyone together. She gets Homer to be a good dad. Marge is the one that there's the fewest edition, but it, the left hates when anything in pop culture, they want to own it all. And so, it's good to have fun. - Now that we've gotten the important stuff out of the way, let's talk about big tech because you've been right in the center of this thing. As you know, I've been fighting it from my garage for the last five years. Trump did this executive action. 230 is the, what do you call it? It's not a bill. It's a... - So it's section 230-- - Section 230. - Of a bill called the Communications Decency Act. - Right, so basically what he did was stripped some protections from the big boys, from Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Now my personal preference and I think we're pretty close on this. The libertarian side is you don't want the government running around sending regulators to these companies 'cause that's not gonna do good, but stripping protections to me seemed like the right idea. Do you agree it was the right idea? Is it enough? Is it not enough, et cetera. - So I think it is the right idea. It's something I'd been urging Trump to do for three years so I'm glad that the administration did it. Listen, I agree with your sensibility. Nobody wants government free speech police. I mean that would be a terrible outcome. - Well, some people do but... - Nobody who's not insane, and that's a qualifier, we can talk about some more because there are a lot of people that fall into that category, but government free speech police would be a terrible outcome. But what big tech is doing, it's deliberate, it's conscious, it's naked. It's abusive and it's dangerous. I think it's the single biggest threat to free speech and democracy we have in this country. Because big tech has become a monopoly, controlling the instruments of communication. And I've chaired multiple hearings in the Senate on big tech censorship. And one of the hearings, we talked about a document that Google had prepared it's called the good sensor. So they prepared, its PowerPoint about 50 page long. And it talks about how the old vision of the internet was the free speech laissez-faire internet, where people could speak and say what they wanted. And then it talked about the new vision of the internet. And this is Google's own words is the European style censorship model. And by the way, the four companies that Google identified as implementing it were Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This is a conscious decision and the dangers are enormous. So the question is, how do you fix it? If it is a problem, we have a long discussion about whether it's a problem, although they're not hiding it anymore. - Yeah, I think most sane people at this point would agree that there, even people that disagree with us politically on this, I think most people realize that the extraordinary amount of power is a problem one way or another. - So I will, it's interesting the political debate though, one of the talking points at big tech in the left is they don't engage in censorship. And the reason they say that is they say, well, there are no objective data that prove we do. And it's, there's the old aphorism of the guy who kills his parents and then pleads mercy on the court 'cause he's an orphan. It's true, there are no objective data because big tech controls all the data and there's zero transparency, zero accountability. So you can use anecdotes and I've gone through lots and lots of specific anecdotes, but every time you ask big tech and I've done it in writing, I've done it in hearings, simple questions. All right, in the 2018 election cycle, how many posts from Republican candidates for office did you block or shadow ban? How many posts from Democratic candidates for office did you block or shadow ban? Their objective answer's to that. There is a number and they know the number and they refuse to answer it and then say, there are no data. And so how do you fix it? I think one way to fix it is getting rid of the special immunity from liability that big tech has that Congress gave them. - So that's 230, right? - That's 230. And the reason 230 was passed, Congress believed big tech would be a neutral public forum. In other words, it wasn't fair to sue Facebook for a comment made by an individual commenter 'cause it wasn't, they weren't the speaker, it was someone else. And so that was Congress's reasoning. So we're gonna give big tech this immunity from liability because it's third party speakers and we want to see the internet grow. Well, what's happened is big tech changed their mind. They said, we're not going to be, to use the language of the Google document, the laissez-faire free speech place anymore, we're going to sensor, well, you know what? If they're gonna silence views they disagree and promote views they agree with they don't deserve, I don't believe as a public policy matter, a special protection for liability. There's also the antitrust laws. Google is a monopoly. By any measure, big tech is richer, stronger, more powerful than AT and T was when it was broken up under the antitrust laws. They're bigger than bigger than US Steel was, a line from the godfather, were bigger than US Steel, well they were bigger than US Steel. And that abuse of power, so I've also, you wanna talk about the real, what the Trump administration did on section 230 will be challenged. It's at the FCC. There'll be litigation. The real bite here is federal antitrust litigation, which I have urged the president to pursue, I have urged the vice president pursue, I've urged the attorney general to pursue, I've urged the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission to pursue, I've urged the White House chief of staff to pursue, I've urged the White House Counsel to pursue, to force the transparency, to get the answers and to stop their naked bias. - Are you worried though that as we sit here right now in the middle of July only three, four months before an election that in a certain way that the ship has already sailed, the damage that they've done. And even if you could get everything you wanted tomorrow, pass tomorrow, by the time the processes and the systems are implemented, congratulations, the elections passed. - I am deeply worried about it. One at one of the hearings I chaired, we had testimony from a guy named Dr. Epstein. - Oh yeah, I know about it. - And he's a psychologist. He used to be the editor of Psychology Today. He's an academic. He's by the way, not a conservative, he's a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and openly supported Hillary Clinton. And he did empirical research on Google's manipulative search outcomes. So it's interesting psychology. When you type in a search, the auto-correct, the auto-fill in not the auto-correct, but what automatically populates, makes a huge difference. And the first few stories that come up, make a huge difference. And there was a dramatic differential between when you typed in Hillary Clinton, it would auto-populate good things. - [Dave] Yeah, all good things, yeah. - When you typed in Donald Trump, it would auto-populate bad things. And the stories that would come up would be predominantly good stories for Hillary, predominantly bad stories for Trump. And what was interesting is Dr. Epstein did the study and he concluded that in 2016, Google's deceptive search outcomes shifted 2.4 million votes to Hillary Clinton. And he said this as a Hillary Clinton supporter, but he was horrified, but he also projected, he said in 2015, he said, big tech is getting worse. It's getting more aggressive. They could move as many as 15 million votes to the Democrats in 2020. And so I think it's a huge threat. - So as a sci-fi guy, cause I know you're a sci-fi guy, in a certain way, doesn't it feel like we're already in the dystopian future that we're always worried about that so many great movies are about that. In a way we're kind of there already. - We are because the power and ubiquity, I mean, what makes social media different, look, there's all sorts of biased media outlets. The New York times is ridiculously biased, but you can pick it up and you can say, okay, this is a partisan rag and you can know it. What is so such a game changer with social media is that it's invisible. So if they don't like what you say, you can post and it just fades into ether and you don't know, you have no idea. So I've got, on Twitter, I think my personal Twitter, I think we've got 3.7 million followers. I have no idea to this date. I've asked by the way the CEO, when I post something, what percentage of the people who've chosen to follow me see it. They won't answer. - Did you know that shadow banning is actually in the Twitter terms of service? - I have not seen that. - There's a... I'll show it to you after this or my guys can maybe pull it up and we'll show it right now, in their terms of service when they renewed it on January 1st, because they know nobody's paying attention, it actually says that they can throttle accounts and not throttle accounts. So they're telling us in their own terms of service that it's in there and then the guys get up on Capitol Hill and they tell you we don't do it. - It is, the magnitude of the power. And you know, you talk about dystopian worlds, the hard left, and I'm interested Dave. So you used to be a man of the left and-- - Nobody's perfect. - You're not now. Why? I'd be interested in... - My audience has heard it many times, but I'll give you the bumper sticker version was, one day it just hit me that it could not possibly be true that everyone I disagree with is a bigot and a racist and a homophobe. And I know that sounds almost cliche to say, but every argument of the left came down to that. And I could not believe somehow that I was so morally right about every position that I had come to and that everyone else was so ridiculously evil. Like it was basically a math equation and I was like, the math doesn't work here anymore. It can't be right. And then the bizarre thing that happened, and I'm sure four years ago, I was saying all sorts of crazy things about you. And I was saying all sorts of crazy things about Rand Paul and a bunch of people. - And only half of that were true. - Exactly, but a bunch of, but once you suddenly look at the other side and you go, holy cow, these conservatives, these libertarians, they really just want to get out of your way in most respects. Once you see that, it's very welcoming. So it's like, I know we have political disagreements. We disagree on abortion, for example. And I'm more than happy to talk about it if you want to, but I know that you wanna live in the same country as me and the left has created this odd thing where if you don't agree with them on everything, you're out, man. And I just don't wanna have anything to do with it. - Look, I get that. And particularly in this time and listen, in the age of Trump, everything has gotten personal and angry and it's a morality play. You have, we're so pulled apart. But look, one of the differences that I get really frustrated with the left, they are willing to use government power to impose their worldview on everybody and to punish anyone who dares descent. This is true in the censorship world. This is true.. It is, at the end of the day, the lefter status. They believe in government power. I'm someone who cares deeply about the constitution and bill of rights and free speech. And that means the right of people who disagree profoundly with me to speak and engage and I agree with John Stuart Mill, the cure for bad speech is more speech. So don't silence views you disagree with. Engage with them on the merits and actually have ideally a civil decent respectful conversation. And you're right, immediately starting with, if every conversation begins with you're a Klansman, that sort of dampens the next step of the conversation. - Yeah, you don't get much further than that. I gotta show you. I have a copy of "On Liberty" in my nightstand. So I'm with you on that. - All right, I've gotta tell you something very funny. So you and I before the show, were talking about Houston Rockets and I'm a die hard Houston Rockets fan. One of the stranger things I own when I was, I think I was in college and I was on an airplane and Hakeem Olajuwon. Was on the airplane. - I already loved this story, wherever it goes. - He was sitting up in first class. I was back in the cattle car. He was up, a time when I guess NBA players didn't fly private everywhere, but he was sitting there and I was sort of starstruck. And so I went up and asked for his autograph, but the only thing I had is I was reading John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". - That's incredible. - And I had a red pen that I was underlining it with. So I'd got it home. I'm not sure where it is, which is, but I have a Hakeem Olajuwon number 34, signed on the title page of John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". - You literally have my whole life in a book, basically. That's absolutely incredible. I told you that '95 Rockets team is my favorite team of all time. All right, so wait a second. So let's push a little further on this. So because the left wants to use state power in a way that, generally speaking, the right doesn't want to, or at least that you don't want to, if we're to go on this dystopian future idea, are you worried that if these guys really take power, I mean, they're going to start jailing political opponents. They are going to use, we know they've already used the IRS to do all sorts of crazy things. I mean, these are things that are sort of conspiracy theories. And then, suddenly at this point, nothing feels like a conspiracy theory. - But it's all justified in the end. There's a self righteousness to it. We are right. Anyone who disagrees is evil. Therefore anything is justified to suppress the evil. You see that with cancel culture where people go like get driven out of the public discourse. Look, when I was, in college, I was a college debater. Yes, I was one of the cool kids. But, so I was in college. I was the chairman of the conservative group in the debates society and one of my closest friends was the head of the liberal group. And we would have arguments about free enterprise and socialism, like what works, what actually benefits humanity. And actually that question is an important question. Too often, people start with the assumption the other side wants humanity to suffer. If we start with the premise, okay, most people of good will would like people to be happier and more well off and more prosperous, we start with that premise, then we can have a conversation about, okay, what systems produce more prosperity, more opportunity. It's, couple of years ago, I did three CNN town hall debates with Bernie Sanders and they were 90 minutes long. And Bernie looked, to Bernie's credit, he's an unabashed socialist. I disagree with him, but he's honest. And we can have a conversation about socialism. I think if you look across the world, it doesn't work. It's produced misery, poverty, suffering, death. My family fled Cuba and so I'm more than happy to take the American free enterprise system, or as the left derisively calls it, capitalism and put it up next to communism or socialism or any dictatorship they've implemented in any country on earth. And people are better off. They have more opportunity. And in particular, there's the mobility. You look at the dystopian worlds, one of the elements of it is everyone is frozen in their place. Socialist countries, communist countries. There are rich people. There are powerful people. What you don't see is new rich people. What you don't see, when my dad in 1957 was a teenage kid from Cuba, couldn't speak English, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, why did he come to America? Because this is a country where you could be a teenage kid washing dishes and climb that socioeconomic ladder, and-- - Kind of worked out for his kid. - If someone had told my father in 1957, that 50 years in the future, his son would be in the Senate, that teenage immigrant could never have believed it. And that, but if we can have conversations, then we can say, all right, what works? What doesn't work? The left is afraid to have those conversations. Their ideas don't work. All right, there's a joke that I tell sometimes, which is how many radical leftist does it take to screw in a light bulb. - How many? - That's not funny! Come on guys, just relax, like lighten up. And, I was talking about in college when we were debating, we'd go, he called me a fascist, I'd call him a communist then we go get a beer. Like just, not all of life has to be, I must destroy my enemy. And there's a lot of that right now. - But do you think there's a fundamental reason for that? I think there actually is, that lefties now and not always, and I actually wanna ask you about what it used to be like when there was a sort of sane Democratic Party. But if there's a fundamental reason for the anger and the outrage and the perpetual craziness which is they believe government is everything. And that you know this as a Senator, it's a pretty freaking messy probably often miserable game that you have to play to be a politician in America or probably anywhere. And that because their whole world view is through politics as opposed to a religious or some other spiritual worldview well, of course you're gonna be endlessly miserable. Do you think I'm ball-parking something there? - So I do. And it's interesting. I was talking the other night to a gentleman, he and his wife came from Cuba and came from Cuba, fled under Castro. And he was talking about, he said, Ted, you talk about the constitution quite a bit. And he said, I think there are a lot of people like me who came from countries where constitution was meaningless. And they don't necessarily understand why that matters. And they're a little bit skeptical of, why should the constitution make a difference? And I was agreeing with him in that we need to explain that more, government power, the history of humanity is largely a history of government oppressing the people. Now you need some government, I'm not an anarchist. You need government to protect your fundamental rights to life, to Liberty, to property. John Locke wrote about the fundamental natural rights. You need government to impose rule of law. And we see countries that don't have that are disasters, but the more power government has the less liberty you have. And Jefferson had a great way of putting it. He described the constitution as chains to bind the mischief of government. - Yeah that's pretty profound. - You look at the first amendment, free speech is not about silencing those who disagree with you. Religious liberty. It's not about forcing everyone to practice your faith. It's about saying, look, it's up to you. What faith you practice or not at all. That right of conscious that you get to decide that it's not government that comes in, you just heard, all right, you talked about abortion. You and I may disagree on abortion, but you just heard Joe Biden a week ago. Say if he's elected, he's coming after the little sisters of the poor. - No, I'm completely against that, by the way. I mean, I've done videos on it. Yeah. - I mean, that is an extreme view. You literally have politicians saying those damn Catholic nuns, I'm gonna go after them and force them to pay for abortion inducing drugs. And these are nuns who have taken vows of poverty and are helping the poor and the sick and the needy. And government now for years has been persecuting them because they must conform. And it's just, look, I think being libertarian, live and let live, giving people like respecting diversity solves a lot of the problems we have in the country. - So speaking of diversity then, do you ever feel that because you mentioned your father and your family's story, because you're a Republican because you're on the right, that in many ways, the people who love to scream about diversity all day long, they've sort of stolen that from you. I know you don't waive it as a victim card, but your own personal family story. And because you look white, so to speak and because you're on the right, you're just a white guy. Congratulations. - Look, on social media, it is amazing you look at some of the angry protesters who sometimes are angry rich white guys, who are telling everyone look, the riots that occurred following the horrific killing of George Floyd. Many of the neighborhoods that were burned down were African American neighborhoods. Some of the most poignant and powerful videos were of residents there crying, going, okay, you just burned my only grocery store. African American small business owners, whose stores were destroyed and destroyed by self-entitled often middle or upper class kids. Look, I grew up, my mom is Irish and Italian from a working class family. She was supposed to never go to college. My dad, as I said, was an immigrant with nothing. When I was in high school, my parents went bankrupt. We had a small business. It was the mid '80s, oil crash, we lost everything. We lost our home, we lost, I mean, lost everything. So I went to college at age 17. My parents couldn't pay any tuition. I was on my own at 17. and I'm grateful for a country that let a kid. Now, my parents gave me a home with love and nurturing. And so in that respect, I was rich. I was rich in terms of having a mom and dad who loved me and encouraged me. But I was on my own. And that's the beauty of this country. And I think the single biggest lie in all of politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. I think it's absolutely false. If you look at Democrats today, they are the party of Silicon Valley billionaires. They are the party of Wall Street tycoons. They are the party of power and resources and Republicans, the party that I want to be a part of is a blue collar party. We're the party of Ohio steelworkers, we're the party of single moms waiting tables we're the party of teenage kids like my dad washing dishes. Why, because opportunity is why. The ability of people to have a job and to work is powerful. - Do you see that as the ultimate irony of what's happened with Silicon Valley? Is that I think privately, I mean, I know a lot of these guys, privately they're libertarians, of course they are because they want to create, they love competition and they want to be taxed low so that their businesses can thrive. And then publicly what you see them say is completely the reverse. - Well, look, I mean, silicone Valley is so bad that, Peter Thiel. Peter has been a buddy of mine for 25 years. - Yeah, we're friends too. - Peter and I were friends before he had made his money. When Peter and I became friends, it was the mid nineties and he was a corporate lawyer practicing law. Silicon Valley is so bad that Peter was driven out of it. I mean, he's moved out to LA. - To Los Angeles. - Like it, - You know something's wrong when you're coming to LA for a safe Haven from the left. - And there's, big tech is about power. And it's also about virtue signaling. It's about showing that you're morally self-righteous. And when they're driving someone like Peter Thiel out saying, you are a heretic and it's on view after view after view, there is, it's interesting, it's a religious fervor. It's become the new religion. Wokeness is, and by the way, no one can be too pure. Like I mean, there's an element of like Robespierre setting up the guillotine where they will come after, someone is only 99% woke. Well, the 1% is coming after them. And that, - Well we see that with all these Hollywood people, right? Because no matter how much they beg, they think it's gonna spare them, but it's not gonna be the angry Trump supporters who come to burn down their mansions. It's gonna be these other guys, no matter what pendants you offer them, but that's sort of gets back to what I was asking you before about, do you think that because the worldview is bereft of anything other than politics, that the hole it leaves actually it leaves you with, what people would say is a God shaped hole that there is no sort of spiritual anything there. So you become the very thing that you hate in essence. - Yeah, I'm not sure big tech hates it all that much. So I actually think, tech started out as... And by the way, my parents are both mathematicians and computer programmers. So, I mean, I was raised in a techie world. Their small business was a seismic data processing company. My parents were programming. I mean, my mom started as a programmer in 1956. I mean, really the dawn of computers. I think tech started out, you had people let's say Mark Zuckerberg, drops out of college, goes and starts Facebook. They are just trying to build a business and they're doing their own thing. And big tech didn't start out all that political. It was go, hey, play foosball in the office and wear shorts and flip flops and go innovate and be disruptive. The whole disruptor thing is a big part of the ethos. And early on, I don't see Silicon Valley as deeply political. It's more recently, and its... It's a clothing of protection. For one thing, these guys are the modern day Robin Berets. I mean the vast amount of wealth as these plutocrats live in, they're owning islands and flying massive jets and just-- - they've got walls around those houses, and security with guns, it's all very confusing. - And it all becomes just, I actually don't think they cared that much about this, but they don't wanna be rejected by the mob. I think it's much more a protective shield. And the world of social media becomes self-reinforcing where, we used to have homogenizing institutions of whether it was church or school or the rotary club where you might be a Democrat, but you knew some Republicans, you might be a Republican, you knew some Democrats, you might be Christian or Jewish or Muslim, but you knew people of different faiths and it was not... On social media now, anyone disagrees, gets unfriended and it becomes this echo chamber where everyone has the same view. And when I look at our democracy, what I worry about is there aren't shared facts anymore. We're not, the left is listening to left-wing websites. They're listening to their own facts. The right is listening to right-wing websites. By the way, look, Fox is every bit as one sided, as biased as MSNBC is. And neither one of them are actually like having an objective conversation. I worry about what that's doing to our country. - Do you ever get invited on MSNBC anymore. - I haven't been in a while. I mean, I've done Chris Matthews, - He's gone. - He's gone. They they drove him out, you're right. - So the last time you were invited by the guy who they took out. - Last time I did it, Chris Hayes interviewed me. We did a thing called The Texas Tribune there was this space. So I did an hour interview and I agreed to that, we actually had a good, actually that was a good substantive conversation. It's about an hour long. And it, he came at me pretty hard, which is fine. I mean that, if we're having a conversation, that's a step in the right direction. - So do you miss? I mean, I think I know the answer is, but do you miss sort of the same Blue Dog more centrist Democrat because I think Biden was the last hope of that thing. That's what it strikes me as and clearly he's not gonna be the savior, obviously for many reasons, but you know Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot that you want this healthy tension between the left and the right. And it's like, look, I know I'm new to the right so maybe I don't see some of the problems that you guys had been around, so you see, but what I see is this pretty diverse group of the real Trump people, the more libertarian people that are all sort of trying to fight for what the future is. On the left, I just see purging. Do you miss the old school? I know JFK is before your time, but do you miss an old school Democrat? Daniel Patrick Moynihan. - Yes. Look, JFK is a great example. Scoop Jackson on foreign policy who believed in standing up to communists. You look at JFK, I often quote JFK. You read his speeches for example, what he says on religious liberty, you read his speeches on cutting taxes, where he campaigned in 1960 on we're gonna cut your taxes and we're gonna cut your taxes, that's gonna produce more jobs, more prosperity. That's going to benefit everyone. Those speeches, he would be driven out of the Democratic Party, like some crazy heretic today. You look at the tax cut we passed in 2017. You know, how many Democrats voted for it in the house? Zero. - Zero. - In the Senate zero. There was nobody. I'll give you another example. One that the media refused to cover, but it's one that I got very passionate about. The Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment in the Senate to repeal the free speech protections of the first amendment. Now this was following the Citizens United case, which Citizens United become this totem. So Hillary Clinton pled every justice I appoint is gonna repeal Citizens United. Joe Biden said the same thing. - Do they know when they say that about what the Supreme court nominees are gonna do in the future that that's not really how government works. I mean, everyone does this across the board, right? - But what's interesting for Democratic nominees that largely does. So I've got a book that's coming out in October called "One Vote Away". And it talks about how one vote on the Supreme court can change history. And it goes through the history on the left. So on Citizens United, Citizens United, by the way, like a lot of people don't know what the case was about. It was about a movie maker who made a movie critical of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration wanted to punish the movie maker for daring to criticize Hillary Clinton. And the Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment. The first version of the constitutional amendment would have given the federal government what's called plenary power. Plenary is a legal term that just means blanket, broad, total. - Yeah, the whole damn thing. - Plenary power to regulate any expenditure of money for political speech. That would mean if a little old lady spent $5 on a poster board and a stick and put it in her front yard saying, vote for Joe Biden or vote for Donald Trump, Congress could make that a crime. That would mean by the way, Look, we're sitting here in a room where you've bought this furniture. You've got TV cameras there. This is expending money. That would mean Congress could regulate with total impunity. So we debated it extensively in the Senate. I asked Democrats on judiciary committee three questions. Should Congress be able to ban movies? Should Congress be able to ban books? And should Congress be able to ban the NAACP? NAACP is a corporation. So their second version said, we'll just give them total power over corporations. Well, corporations aren't people. They're collections of people. My answer to those three questions are no, no and hell no. When we voted on it, do you know that every single Democrat in the Senate voted to repeal the free speech protections of the first amendment? I mean, liberals used to defend, there's a famous case that went to the Supreme court where a guy wore into a courthouse, a jacket that said F the draft although he didn't abbreviate it and it went all the way to the Supreme court and the Supreme court rightly upheld his right to wear that. And one of the justices said, one man's obscenity is another man's lyric. There are none of those liberals left in politics. There are handful in the world, but in politics, they don't believe in free speech anymore. And that's scary. - Can I give you the Star Wars reference that you can use for this going forward, it's order 66. That's what the progressives did. They executed order 66 on the liberals and they hunted them down. And there's a couple in hiding Bill Maher, maybe three or four other guys, what would have been formerly me, I would say. And that's kinda where we're at now. - You are right. And look, Yoda escaped. I liked that. That has you hiding out, but it, there is a rabbit intolerance. So the left demands conformity. And you think about it, socialism. Socialism is about the government being in charge of everything. That demands total conformity. You take something like federalism. I'm a massive believer in federalism. We have 50 states. Who would expect California to adopt the same laws as Texas. And that's okay. Look, I, that's why we have 50 states. You can choose. I think the laws of each state should reflect the value. So let's take something like drug legalization. So personally speaking, I'm not in favor of drug legalization, but I think it's a state question. I think it's perfectly fine for different states to come to different answers on it. And then for there to be a diversity and to see what works. The left doesn't like that diversity. And I'll give you an example. Here's a question very few people ask, socialized medicine. So it's become the new mantra that everyone has to support socialized medicine, medical care for all. There are 50 States in the union. How many have adopted socialized medicine? - Is it maybe three? Is it zero? Is it, what about Massachusetts? Didn't they do something now? - No, they did Romney care, which was the predecessor to Obamacare, but let's take California. California, there's a Democratic governor, a Democratic super majority in the legislature. They could adopt socialized medicine tomorrow. You know why they didn't? Because they ran the numbers and it'll bankrupt the state. - Right. Well, when Obama had a super majority himself as president, he didn't do it. - Vermont, Bernie Sander's home state, they don't have socialized medicine. Here's part of the reason why? If California adopted it and there's nothing, Republicans can't stop them. It is the Democrats who have decided that we should not have socialized medicine in California. And the reason is the taxes they would have to impose would crush small businesses even more. It would cause them to flee the state to move to Texas. So what does the left wanna do? Here's our solution. Let's impose it on the whole damn country. So you can't flee unless you're willing to go to New Zealand. If you're gonna stay in the United States, there's no place to go. My view, look under the constitution of California on socialized medicine, knock yourself out. I think it's a bad policy, but probably wrong. Go show me that it works. But it is the view, everyone must conform that it isn't truly dangerous. - So you mentioned the debates that you had with Bernie Sanders, the couple on CNN, I saw them. And when people say to me, well Dave, you seem so different politically than you did five years ago. I always say the one thing that I really did shift on was economics. So I'm way more right Libertarian on economics. Most of the other things, actually, I still believe I'm standing up for my true liberal beliefs, not the way liberalism has been butchered now. When you had those debates with him, do you think Bernie now slightly regrets what he has unleashed here? Because I think you could look at the crazy Marxist lunacy and the squad and identity politics and the hatred of America. I mean, every Bernie debate, what was it? We're going to have a, he kept saying political revolution 'cause he knew if he just said revolution, that means heads on spikes, which that's coming. Give it a little while. But do you think he maybe regrets some of what he has led to here? Or do you think he's just riding it out? Now, I'm also, I will say one of the things which is, I'm a firm believer. They will take him out too, because eventually he will just be an old failed white guy who played by the system. Played by the rules. - I don't think he regrets it. So Bernie is a true believer and I prefer honesty. A lot of Democrats for a long time pretended they weren't socialists, even though they've voted like it. Bernie's changed that party and changed that party dramatically. And look, I think Bernie is grumpy that he's not the savior that he wanted to be. So look, a lot of revolutionaries in Cuba, Fidel Castro was about Fidel Castro. He wanted the power to be the dictator. I think Bernie is unhappy. There's a particular kind of bitterness. You look at how Bernie deals with say Elizabeth Warren, who is a younger interloper. And both of them look at AOC and go, who the hell are you? Now, they're all on the same team, but it's sort of... - Except I don't think, I agree he's a true believer, but I don't think he had like this sort of true fundamental hatred of all of our institutions, AOC, Ilhan Omar, the others, now again, I'm not saying I'm totally right about this, but I sense like a real, like let's destroy the whole damn thing with them. Then I think Bernie was the thing that allowed it into the system. - Well and you look at, for example, let's take statues that are being torn down. So the debate started with Confederate statutes and we can have a conversation about that. Look, I'm one that believes we shouldn't erase history, but I also believe slavery is the original sin of America, it is a grotesque evil. And our nation fought a bloody civil war where 600,000 people died to end slavery and our journey to civil rights has it been a long journey. It's been an imperfect journey. We continue on that journey. But, but as Dr. Martin Luther King said, the arc of history bends towards justice. But it started out as a discussion of confederate monuments. Then it became a discussion of George Washington, of Thomas Jefferson, of James Madison. It became people defacing statues of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S grant because they were such big Confederates. - Frederick Douglas. - So the ignorance of it, Frederick Douglas, like the angry mob at some point when you're attacking Washington and Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, It's not that you hate slavery. It's not that you hate racism. You hate America. - But so what I'm trying to figure out that when I see today's Democrats, it's even, Pelosi when she's now nodding to them like, Oh, well, people have grievances. And it's like, I don't think she believes it, but she's just trying not to get her mansion burned down. Do you think it's that bad? It seems to me that's obvious at this point. - I think it is, there's a video I saw on Twitter of some college kids. I think they were in New York and there was a riot and... - We are on your side - We're on your side. I mean, it was no, no, no don't burn us down. - Yeah, so they throw the rock through their window and they're supposedly cheering them on and it's like, nobody's there's no side because it's a... - And you look at, you look at the angry Marxists who want to destroy this country. And I worry about our education that people don't understand. What we have in America is unique in the history of the world. Most of history, look free speech, free speech doesn't exist in many countries on earth today. And we're not training our kids to know, to understand the degree to which, they're just being told, everything is systematically racist. We just had a debate in the Senate judiciary committee where all these Democrats are saying nothing has changed in the 50 years. I'm like what? Utter garbage, nothing has changed. We had Jim Crow laws. We had segregated schools with segregated water fountains. You're saying the march in Selma didn't do anything? I mean, that is... And the problem is it's a lie. If people don't understand the journey towards justice, towards protecting people's rights, then they wanna burn it all down, which ends up hurting everybody's rights. - Okay, so the obvious question there is, are the two, as we watch now, mainstream media burned down and the institutions burned down. So you're a Harvard guy, you're a Princeton guy. These are institutions that are on fire right now. I would say rightfully so the New York Times rightfully so, the 1619 project, let this thing freaking burn. The amount of hit pieces that they've done on me that they've done on people in my circles that I'm sure they've done on you, but are you worried that if all of these liberal in the right sense of liberalism, institutions burned down, that we will have nothing that will allow us for national cohesion? 'Cause you sort of hit on that earlier. - Yeah, I'm deeply worried about it. They're no longer liberal in any real sense of the word. They're authoritarian. The New York times fired their editor because he dared write an op-ed from a US Senator. - He didn't write it, He just allowed it to-- - Published it. He allowed it to be published. We think about for a second, And then look, I actually, look the op-ed that Tom Cotton wrote, it was okay. I actually didn't agree with a lot of stuff he said. I thought it was a bit much. But if you disagree with it, write something saying it's wrong. Like, why are you, part of it is a testament of fear. You don't believe in your own ideas. Free speech, and by the way, you hear people in the Senate all the time say, well, speech that's offensive shouldn't be allowed. That's exactly what the first amendment is about. You don't need the first amendment for speech that everyone agrees with. If the majority agrees with it, you don't need the first amendment to protect your rights to say, puppy dogs are nice. That's like, at least right now, nobody is stopping the pro puppy dog... - Patients, patients. - Supreme Court in another famous decision, Skokie, Illinois, the Nazis wanted to march. Supreme Court rightly said, you've got a right to march. Now, by the way, when it comes to Nazis, I'm perfectly happy to say they're evil, ignorant, bigoted morons. And I'm not scared of them saying whatever idiocy they wanna say because, now I think we have a moral obligation to engage in it, to say why it's wrong, but government shouldn't silence them. Why should we be afraid of the Klan, the Klan are idiots? And we need to demonstrate why what they're saying is wrong, but inevitably the mob calls everyone a Nazi or Klansman and they use it to justify regulating, J. K. Rowling now can't say women exist. That is deemed the same as Adolf Hitler. Okay, that's just a little nuts. Like, we can have a respectful civil conversation, but you're right. There are no Walter Cronkite, used to report, and Ella Cronkite leaned left, but not in a virulently partisan way. And some of it is the media. Trump broke the media. But like, they hate him so much. There is no longer, there used to be, five years ago, the media pretended they were impartial. Remember they would argue, there is no bias in media. Have you heard anyone make that argument? - Nobody says that anymore. - Because it's so obvious that they've decided we're not, they no longer hold out impartiality as an objective to which when the New York Times-- - Well, because impartiality is now proof that you're somehow racist or something like that. - The 1619 project, - You're upholding the system. Yeah. Is a fundamentally racist bigoted endeavor. And the New York Times admits to redefine history and the real danger of the 1619 project is going to be all the little tyranny of leftists in the school boards that begin teaching it in schools. This is propaganda that is of Orwellian proportions. - So Senator Cruz, are you telling me that the United States didn't invent slavery? We didn't invent slavery. I mean, we also got rid of it pretty quickly. They don't really wanna get that. And it was going on for thousands and thousands of years and it's still going on in parts of the world. Somehow that's inconvenient. - And listen, the abolitionists. So one of the rich ironies is the Democrats who moralize on questions of race. The Democratic Party is an absolute frigging train wreck on race. It was Democrats who founded the KKK. It was Democrats who wrote Jim Crow. It was Democrats who implemented segregation. The party I'm a member of, the Republicans, was founded to oppose slavery. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. The reason we were founded, now here's the Democratic narrative. Well yes, that was true then. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who's the founder of the KKK, was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1860. The, media narrative is yes, that was then but the Democrats changed. Well, interesting, Let's go to the civil rights act of 1964, a lot higher percentage of Republicans supported that than Democrats did. It was the Dixiecrats. Bull Connor was a Democrat. The guys with the dogs and the clubs beating the civil rights protestors without exception were Democrats. And they said, well, okay, fine. That's true up to the sixties. But magically, it changed. Dave right now today, as we sit here, the sitting governor of Virginia chose to put in his yearbook a picture of a Klansman and it may or may not have been him. - Yeah, may or may not. - Now think of the pathology of the media for a second. So Ralph Northam was a Democrat. He's an elected Democrat today. Not 50 years ago, not 100 years ago, today in 2020, he put in his yearbook, a picture of one guy dressed as a Klansman, another guy in black face. Now what an indictment of the media that everyone freaked out about the black face. Now look, all right, I can accept that black face. I can understand why that would be seen as disrespectful. Like the media is a little freaked out about it. Like every late night comic is dressed in black face. And I don't think it was a big deal in Texas. I don't think I've ever known anyone who's dressed in black face. It seems like in Virginia, every elected politician just about did it. But it was weird that between the two, they have this hysterical fit about the black face and no one comments about the Klan outfit and Ralph Northam's comment the day after it broke, it was the most revealing. It was before they had gotten their talking points down. He said, he acknowledged that he could have been one of those two people. And he didn't say which one. If you're in elected office and you cannot say categorically, I have never in my life dressed as a Klansman. You talk about cancel culture. As far as I'm concerned, if you don't know if you've been a Klansman, I'm more than prepared to vote you out office. - So is that Trump's greatest skill because you guys went at it pretty hard in 2016 and now you've become one of, I would say you're one of his biggest allies in the Senate, but you guys were going after each other and said a lot of mean stuff about each other and all that. But would you say his greatest skill is that, well, you said it earlier that he broke the media, but that he broke the inequity in the system. The inequity in the system meaning that culture just teaches everybody, you're a Republican, you're a conservative, you're on the right, you're bad. You're a Democrat, you're a lefty, whatever, you're good. And that Trump broke the whole damn thing. And that that is why we're all kind of crazy right now. But in my view, at this point, it was a necessary move. - So yes, I think there are a couple of things. I think one, - By the way, we've been talking for almost an hour, we've only said Trump like twice. I think we just said some sort of record here. That's pretty impressive. - Look, I think 2016 was a giant screw you to Washington. I think working class voters were fed up with Washington. You want to understand the 2016 election it's blue collar workers across the country. There's a reason why in 2016, Trump and I, in almost every state in the primary either he was one and I was two with blue collar voters, or I was one and he was two. And it's almost perfectly correlated. The states where I was one and he was two are the 12 states I won. The states where he was one and I was two are the states he won and no other Republican won more than a single state. It was a blue collar revolution. - Who even won one besides-- - Kasich won Ohio, - Oh, Kasich won Ohio. - Rubio won Minnesota, Trump and I won the other 48. And by the way I remember at the beginning, there were 17 Republicans, conventional wisdom. If you were ranking those 17, nobody in Washington or New York would have said Trump had a chance. And no one said I had a chance. We might have been 16 and 17 on the ordinal rankings of who had a shot. - And by the way, you had men, women, black people, Latinos, white people, the whole thing, what did they have on the other side? - I remember a bunch of reporters, it was in South Carolina and I was doing a press gaggle. And a bunch of reporters said, what do you do about the fact that Republicans are a bunch of old white guys? And I stopped and just started laughing. And I said, number one, have you looked at the Democratic field? They're literally septuagenarian socialists, all of them. Do you know how many Hispanics have ever won a presidential primary in the Democratic Party? - A presidential primary? - Yeah. - No, I'm guessing zero. - A state, I'm talking about a single state. - Even a single state. I'm gonna guess it's zero. - Zero. Julian Castro was complaining that, we shouldn't have Iowa voting because no Hispanic can win. Well, I put it out, look, you look at the 2016 field, we've got an African American world famous neurosurgeon. We've got a woman who was a CEO of a fortune 50 company. We've got two sons of Cuban immigrants who in their forties... I mean, you wanna talk about like, but the press still described us as old white guys and the old white guys who are socialists at their Bolshevik reunion as somehow, Elizabeth Warren just just said, we need new leaders. Do you know Joe Biden, do you know, when Joe Biden was sworn into the senate? - 37 Years ago, it's a little bit crazy. - 1973. I was two when Joe Biden took his oath of office. - He's been presiding over an awful lot of problems. Do you find it hilarious then when as the primary was rolling out, the Democratic primary, that every time someone that was a minority or a perceived minority dropped out. They basically said that their own party was racist. They would say, well, we're not diverse enough. It's like, well, it's your base that's voting you guys out. You can't blame this, but somehow the media spins it. You suddenly like, oh, I guess the Republicans are racist. - Facts don't matter for their narrative. It is a propaganda effort. So I think the Trump election in 2016 was number one, a screw you to Washington. Number two, it was working class voters. Under Obama, the Democratic Party made a choice. It was a very conscious choice between two traditional favored children of the Democratic Party. You were talking about the old Democrat, where there were Blue Dog Democrats. The Democrats made a choice between California environmentalist billionaires and the jobs of labor union members. Now look, the Democratic Party used to be, FDR used to be the working man, the union party, and under Obama, the party decided it wanted the money from the top styers of the world more than it wanted the steel workers and the truck drivers in Pennsylvania to have jobs. And so they consciously, and their view was the union bosses will deliver the votes, those used to be our foot soldiers. We're gonna vote to shut down the Keystone pipeline, screw the jobs. Okay, those guys don't get jobs because it makes us feel better as we are living in multimillion dollar mansions, and it doesn't affect our lives, it makes us feel better to give away their jobs. I think the working class war back at Washington was a big part of 2016. And I also think, look, it's interesting though, I don't think the phrase cancel culture existed in 2016. It was called political correctness then. But the fact that Trump would say, would stand up and speak out and he'd go around the gatekeepers, it's why social media has gotten more vigorous. They're mad that anyone got around the gatekeepers. So they're trying to close off the avenues of communication. - Okay, so I know we're crunched on time here, and I wanna get a couple of video game minutes in with you. So we'll try to do this quick. So do you think, and I don't mean this as a shot to you, but do you think Trump, the reason Trump won was because he was willing to do stuff that you would not have done. Because I think there's a sense of that. Remember there was that moment when Marco Rubio tried it for a day, there was literally that one-- - Yeah, and it didn't work. - And it just blew up in his face. But do you think, and maybe that's not a shot to you or, I don't know if it's credit to Trump or just, it had something to do with how we're all wired or something like that. - So inauthenticity doesn't work, people can smell it when you're a fake. Trump won the primary in 2016 because the media gave him $3 billion in free media. And it has no president in the history of politics. $3 billion in free media. - But do you think that was because he was willing to do something? Meaning just, blow up part of the system. - I actually think it was fundamental corruption on the part of the media. So I think the mainstream media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, they all wanted Hillary to win and they believed Trump was the easiest candidate for Hillary to beat. And I think they made a very conscious decision, all Trump all the time, because they wanted Hillary to win. I think they were corrupt. I think that they had that same corruption. But the consequence, I mean, we've had over two centuries of politics there's never been a candidate worth three billion dollars of free media. It became a tsunami that in the last 30 days, there was $500 million of free media and we couldn't be heard anymore. And I do think people were fed up with Washington and that's what 2016 was. Was a statement about that. - All right, So I said two more, but I'm gonna throw in one more extra. So they still are two. What do you make of the never Trump crew? Like this Lincoln project, these people who are now supporting all Democrats and now we're talking about, it's not just about taking out Trump anymore. Now it's we're gonna find the congressional candidates and the candidates in the Senate. What do you make of these people who, Trump, like him, don't like them, orange, big hair. It's like, he's doing the things that conservatives want done. - So whatever anyone tells you, it's not about the money. It's about the money. Look, these Lincoln project guys are a bunch of political operatives who are making millions. - Who also got everything wrong always, forever. Bill crystal. - Look, they have been, they've been operatives for a long time. So you want to look at the pattern. They've run a lot of loosing presidential races. Loosing to Democrats. They're very good at losing to Democrats. In significant part, you look at all of these guys, so I think the real divide we have is not racial. It's socioeconomic. It is the difference between wealthy elites and working class voters. All of these so-called anti-Trump folks are the people who've been saying, screw you to the working class voters for 20 years. And they're still echoing that. And by the way, I think now they're just making a buck. I mean they're printing money to put money in their own bank account. And listen, when it comes to Trump, there are a lot of things Trump says and does I don't like. I agree with many of the policies he's implemented. And I think he showed a real backbone. And the role I've tried to play the last four years is to encourage the president to go on in a positive direction. To encourage him, let's take social media. This order, I had been urging the administration for three years for them to do this. So I'm glad they did it. It took a lot of work and I'm grateful. I'm grateful, as a president, I think his best characteristic is that he has a backbone. He's willing to make decisions that many Republicans wouldn't make. Things like moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. I urged him to do that. Both the State Department and Defense Department didn't want him to do that. They argued against it. His own State Department and Defense Department. - And every president had run on saying they were gonna do it-- - Democrats and Republicans have broken that promise over and over again. Pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. Again, State and Defense said, don't do it. I urged him to do it, he did it. Look that took balls. I'm grateful for that. Do I wish he didn't send some ridiculous tweets, of course I do. There are times when, it ends up being less effective, but on Capitol Hill, the reporters run to you and they want a comment on every tweet. And I tell them, I said, look, I have a rule of thumb. I don't comment on tweets. Cause I'm not interested in playing media pundit and responding to, at 10:07 am the president tweeted this at 10:09 am, I don't need to do that. You were talking about substance, let's talk about free speech. Let's talk about religious liberty. Let's talk about the second amendment. Let's talk about securing the border. Let's talk about rebuilding our military. I'll talk about substance, but, and I think that substance we've gotten a lot done. - All right, so now I got one more for you. We we did now 70 live minutes. My guys are gonna shoot me. And I know you got to get over to PragerU after this, we didn't talk about COVID at all. So if you could just kind of couch, like how you're feeling we're doing at this very moment, the state's rights part of this. And I guess most importantly, this will be sort of a good ending. Do we ever get out of this phase, this thing that we're all feeling right now, between COVID, between the protests, between the oncoming election. Do we ever get out of this thing and back to something that feels more normal or is to bring it back to Sci-fi, are we heading to a brave new world, a dystopian future, something like that? - Yes, we'll come out of this. - How about a question like that when you only have like three minutes left, but you do what you gotta do. - This actually connected to where we started. This is a good place to wrap up. About how polarized and tribalized we are. One of the things I find bizarre about this pandemic is how people look at it through a political lens. It's all politics. So, my view on the virus, it's serious, it's deadly. We need to take serious steps to combat it. And I've laid out a whole series of steps and been advocating for it. Whether it's increased testing, whether it's investments in vaccines and in treatments that we need to use common sense to stop the spread of the virus. But at the same time, people's jobs matter. 44 million people losing their jobs, that produces real suffering. It produces death. You need to talk about mental illness and depression, alcohol and substance abuse, destroying people's livelihoods is a problem we need to balance. And what's weird is the idea of balance. The idea of let's use some common sense. It feels kind of lonely saying that because, all right let's take, for example masks. Masks have become this bizarre virtue signal. So listen on the right there's some people like never wear a mask no matter what! And I'm like, okay, that seems a little out there. On the left, there are Democrats who, their social media picture has a mask. I remember one, Sherrod Brown, Senator from Ohio gave a floor speech in the Senate a couple of weeks ago. He's wearing a mask during the whole speaker, no one is within 20 feet of him. He's standing alone on the Senate floor with a mask because it's a sign, I am righteous. I am wearing the clothes of the high priest. Now look, you and I talked about it. I've got my damn mask in my pocket. - It's a Houston Rockets mask. - You didn't make up the Olajuwon story. - I believe in, do things that are sensible and use common sense but, viewing it all through a political lens. By the way, I have a prediction. If God forbid Biden wins, the day after the election, everything will be better. The day after the election, everyone will say, go back to school. Go back to work. - Oh, the COVID, the COVID level. - The disease won't suddenly get cured. But everyone likes the people who are saying shut it down. There's a political urgency. They want the great depression because they want to defeat Trump. They won't even wait until Biden is sworn in. If Biden is elected that week, they'll say, all right, everyone needs to go back to work and go back to school. - So you believe they're deliberately tanking the economy. I mean, I've tweeted something to that effect. I believe that Gavin Newsom here in California is trying to destroy the economy so either the feds have to bail us out or-- - They hate Trump so much, it's all consuming. And the angry left, they've convinced themselves that Donald Trump is Hitler. So everything is justified in terms of defeating Hitler. And it's just like, okay, that's... And by the way, the answer, the politicized answer on either side, shut everything down forever, or everyone go back to perfectly normal and don't, pretend there's no pandemic. Neither one of those make a lot of sense to me. But listening to medical professionals and following common sense and also respecting people's jobs, in the media world, who's advocating that? You don't get, if you're not advocating an extreme position, it doesn't exist. - Senator, I feel like we just started here, but it has been 80 minutes. And you got a busy day ahead of you, but I promise. - We gotta close the way you started though which is reminding people to go subscribe to the Verdict podcast, either on the podcast, - Oh you've really become a podcaster now. - Or on YouTube give us a five star rating, subscribe. Look, Verdict podcast, as you know, we launched it during impeachment. It became the number one podcast in the world when we launched it. And so come sign on. And what we're doing every week is having conversations, trying to actually understand what's going on in the world and address real substance and have fun too. - And I'm pretty sure that that Michael Knowles guys is standing on the other side of that door right now 'cause we're going to do a little pickup for Rubin Report. It was a pleasure. I hope you'll come back to talk about your book in October when it comes out. - Excellent. - And may the force be with you. - Indeed. - If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlists all right over here, and to get notified of all future videos, be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell.

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