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Dave Rubin is lastly free. After years of hiding his true self from the world, seemingly ashamed of who he actually is, he says he’s ultimately loud and proud…to confess he’s a hardcore Donald Trump supporter and a conservative.
“In some ways, it was more durable popping out as a Trump supporter than popping out as homosexual,” Rubin writes in his feeble new e-book Don’t Burn This Nation: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia.
Well-known within the right-wing media ecosphere because the “Why I Left the Left” man, Rubin claims to have had a completely natural evolution in just some quick years from a Bernie Sanders-supporting lefty to a “classical liberal” ostensibly dedicated to civil discourse—and now all the best way across the bend to his present incarnation as a MAGA shitposter who calls each Democrat, liberal or non-right wing media determine “evil.”
Rubin made his title because the host of the Rubin Report on YouTube, the place he gained a considerable viewers internet hosting anti-woke “Mental Darkish Net” figures, far-right activists, and overt racists for uncritical (or slavishly fawning) interviews.
However these days, he’s extra of a full-time political commentator than a bobblehead interviewer—steadily showing on Fox Information, Newsmax, and principally any right-wing outlet that may have him (whereas overtly admitting that he received’t have interaction his critics or be interviewed by anybody who doesn’t promise to be tremendous good to him beforehand).
He’s obtained over one million Twitter followers and hangs out with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Massive Grownup Son Donald Trump, Jr., and right-wing billionaire and political financier Peter Thiel. In Membership MAGA, Rubin’s a VIP.
In Don’t Burn This Nation, Rubin ultimately sheds the pretense that he’s “the final sane liberal” or perhaps a “classical liberal.” He writes within the e-book’s introduction that his first tome, Don’t Burn This Ebook, was “my last-ditch effort to save lots of liberals from themselves,” however that simply two years later he’s “not so positive the unique idea of liberalism is salvageable.”
He provides, “The issue is we’ve overdosed on tolerance and self-expression to such an extent that we truly don’t stand for something.”
Very similar to his first e-book, there’s little commentary you received’t already discover on his Twitter feed: The left is not liberal, they’re “a mob of offended, sex-deprived folks.” The proper is tolerant, “a toga get together with a bunch of individuals ingesting and smoking and sharing totally different and infrequently competing concepts.” Jordan Peterson and Larry Elder are amongst “the best thinkers and educators of our time.”
What differentiates Don’t Burn This Nation from its predecessor are the awkward insertions of “good” content material—lengthy passages which might be simply quotes from the likes of Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, and Alexis de Tocqueville, together with the Wikipedia-depth medical bits about how the mind works. And there’s much less dumb af content material than within the first e-book—which at numerous factors argued that the Vietnam Battle was good and that Hitler was of the political left.
However that’s to not say there aren’t loads of dumb and disingenuous goodies available right here.
Railing towards Massive Tech social media platforms, he says the Founding Fathers “had no idea of a giant company,” seemingly oblivious of the impetus for the Boston Tea Celebration revolt.
He calls James Lindsay—the Trump-supporting activist and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who helped start each the important race concept and “groomer” ethical panics—”a lifelong liberal (in a great way!).”
And Rubin weaslely refers to Trump’s Massive Lie by saying the 2020 election was “fraught with skepticism,” falsely smears the COVID vaccine as “unproven and untested,” and gruesomely paraphrases the Beastie Boys, writing: “You gotta struggle on your proper to parrrr-take in freedom.”
But when there’s one factor that defines this e-book, it’s the Trump worship.
To Rubin, Trump is probably the most trustworthy and courageous president America has ever had, and the primary “in trendy historical past” to not “begin a brand new struggle” (which have to be information to anybody alive in the course of the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations). He even takes on a few of the forty fifth president’s tics—as partially evidenced by the quantity of sentences he begins with “Belief me…”
Rubin recounts the time in 2019 when he chatted with Trump for a couple of minutes at Mar-a-Lago (a narrative he’s already informed advert nauseam on his personal present, different folks’s exhibits, and on Twitter). Rubin says the then-president informed him inside seconds of assembly that “I don’t give a shit that you simply’re homosexual” and praised him and his husband’s attractiveness. This single sentence made such an influence on Rubin that he made it the sub-heading of the chapter titled “Dismantling Techniques of Structural Stupidity," and continues to lean on his Trump anecdote as proof of the fitting’s near-universal acceptance of gays.
Trump, personally, may not give a shit that Rubin is homosexual. However a complete lot of Trump’s political allies and supporters in Rubin’s viewers do.
After Rubin and his husband introduced they’d quickly be welcoming two kids by surrogacy, MAGAs swarmed his Twitter mentions to inform him what an abomination he and his household had been.
The American Conservative revealed an article in response titled, “No Allies Who Purchase Infants.” Proper-wing YouTuber Mark Cube known as it “horrifying” and mentioned “Any Christian or conservative congratulating them is simply as unhealthy because the Marxists.” Former Trump authorized adviser Jenna Ellis known as Rubin her “good friend” however added “the gay way of life is morally improper” and “ethical gerrymandering doesn't and can't legitimize any sin.”
Clearly shaken, Rubin went on Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV present to handle the assaults. However quite than stand as much as the Trump-supporting bigots in his viewers, Rubin mentioned he understands why they’re so terrified of two males elevating a baby—as a result of the left is simply that unhealthy!
It’s this sort of viewers seize that has made Rubin wealthy financially, however bankrupt of integrity.
All through Don’t Burn This Nation, Rubin repeatedly whitewashes the homophobia of a considerable portion of the conservative motion—absurdly insinuating that anti-gay GOP activism ended the second SCOTUS legalized homosexual marriage in 2015. And although his freedom to be married to the individual of his selecting is clearly imperiled by Republicans’ anti-LGBTQ laws and open skepticism of the Supreme Court docket’s Obergefell v. Hodges resolution, Rubin sees no evil—until it’s a Democrat.
Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot In opposition to America, imagines an alternate historical past the place the Nazi-sympathetic aviator and "America First" motion chief Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940, after which instantly indicators a treaty with Nazi Germany. The character Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (performed by John Turturro within the HBO mini-series adaptation) helps Lindbergh, incomes entry to the White Home and a modicum of fame because the Jew who tells Lindbergh-supporting People that they’re not antisemites. It doesn’t finish nicely for Bengelsdorf.
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It’s exhausting to not see the parallel with Rubin, who ascended from left-wing media obscurity to right-wing media stardom, operating interference for individuals who worth him as a political pet, however hate who he truly is. That is all whereas a GOP-led legislative storm brews, which threatens his circle of relatives.
In that sense, Don’t Burn This Nation isn’t simply Rubin’s MAGA love letter, it’s 193 pages of self-loathing opportunism.