I noticed the Goodreads review section is full of one-star reviews from people who haven’t actually read Don't Burn This Book, so let me confirm that I did download the audiobook and I did listen to it from start to finish. This meant I missed the myriad typos and misspellings others have cited, freeing me to focus my attention on Dave’s high-level ideas. Having done so, I can confirm that the widely-floating phrase, ‘indistinguishable from parody’ is an accurate description of what an embarrass

I noticed the Goodreads review section is full of one-star reviews from people who haven’t actually read, so let me confirm that I did download the audiobook and I did listen to it from start to finish. This meant I missed the myriad typos and misspellings others have cited, freeing me to focus my attention on Dave’s high-level ideas. Having done so, I can confirm that the widely-floating phrase, ‘indistinguishable from parody’ is an accurate description of what an embarrassing disaster this is. Dave’s extremely well-funded ideas are not the transgressive thoughts of a free-thinking skeptic, and they especially aren’t worth burning. I do not recommendto Dave’s fans, haters, or skeptics, for reasons I will explore in detail below.The reason I wouldn’t even recommend this to Dave's fans is that this book will not help you fight off liberal and leftist arguments, because none of the arguments go deeper than the absolute surface-level logic needed to justify conservative intuitions. The purpose of his book is to coddle you, to convince you that your intuitions (including the bigoted ones) are just as valid as someone else’s informed opinion. This leads Dave to some uncomfortable and cringe-worthy positions (e.g. when he defends Ben Shapiro’s right to think Dave’s love for his husband is disgusting and a sin), and to sloppy arguments that do nothing to engage with what liberals and leftists actually think. (He’s agglomerated these very different political traditions into one superorganism he calls “the left.”)For all his talk of “facts,” Dave didn’t bother to do any research for his book. His arguments are littered with inaccuracies, contradictions, and surface-level thinking. For example, here are the two most egregious arguments from his book:GUNSIn his section on guns, the second most slap-dash in the whole book (I’ll address the number one next), Dave is correct exactly one time: gun violence cannot be solved exclusively by laws, though he doesn't even try to argue why we shouldn’t introduce more laws. He assumes that because prohibition won’t work, we shouldn’t bother trying. (He doesn’t extend this logic to drugs, by the way, arguing elsewhere that heroin and crack are too dangerous to be legal.) Overall, Dave acknowledges that it should be difficult to get ahold of guns, but believes our gun control is sufficient. He accuses progressives of chasing “utopia” with their gun policies, which makes me wonder if he knows that other countries exist, and that a lot of them have lower gun violence rates than the United States.His one invocation of facts™ is also fraudulent. He uses the tired, right-wing cliché of Chicago, which has strict gun control policies and yet a high rate of gun violence. He points to this correlation and says, "see? Doesn't work!" without bothering to investigate why that might be. A reasonable person will note that Chicago is invoked by right-wingers because it’s a major city (and thus full of liberals and gun control) surrounded by areas with lax gun laws, making it easy to bring guns in.In an even slimier move, Dave, like every conservative, mis-cites (i.e. lies about) this statistic: he says that only 11% of firearms used in crimes are obtained from gun retailers. He probably got this number from “Source and Use of Firearms Involved in Crimes: Survey of Prison Inmates, 2016,” a study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. If he had any integrity, (or read the source, himself) he would have explained that, while 90% of gun crimes are committed by people who didn’t acquire the guns legally, only 43% of those guns were bought off the black market; >25% of them can be traced back to legal purchases from American gun shops before trading hands. It took me two minutes to find this source, by the way. Dave Rubin spent years in politics, writing a book about politics, and still doesn’t know how to read a chart or cite more than one example to establish a trend.Dave also brings up the idea that people will use their guns to rise up against a tyrannical government, not citing any examples after the 1770s. Pre-holocaust Germany? Didn’t happen. Jim Crow American south? Didn’t happen. The recent historical record indicates that gun owner majorities won't rise up if they themselves aren’t threatened by their tyrannical government, and more often will side with the tyrannical government against minorities they’re afraid of.TRANS RIGHTSNowhere in the book is Dave’s cowering fear of reasoned debate more apparent than in his section on trans rights. He opens this part by (without irony) comparing gender dysphoria to him wanting to be a transformer when he was a child, which off the bat lets us know that he doesn’t care about this issue or understand the difference.He goes on to disingenuously frame the issue of puberty blockers as allowing children to decide if they want transition by preventing their puberty, ignoring that 1) puberty blockers delay puberty with no permanent changes to the body, they don't just cancel it, 2) puberty blockers are prescribed by doctors, they're not just over-the-counter medications that progressive parents give their kids on a whim, and 3) Dave thinks doctors somehow don’t know that most children outgrow their gender dysphoria, and he doesn’t understand the idea that if we can prevent suffering or suicide down the line by delaying puberty for two years, that might be worth the risk.Let’s be clear: Dave is framing the argument as him versus hysterical activist parents and naive children who can’t think for themselves, but he’s actually arguing that he knows better than the majority of clinical psychologists and medical professionals. He’s hoping you haven't looked into these issues yourself so that he can misrepresent them and make you outraged or afraid.He goes on to take a stand against governments jailing citizens for just using incorrect pronouns, something no government in the entire world has proposed or will propose. The distinction between forbidding intentional misgendering in the workplace and jailing anyone who uses ‘just a word’ is too high-level an idea.A SHORT-LIST OF OTHER THINGS DAVE IS WRONG ABOUTMy point here is not that I disagree with Dave, it’s that Dave doesn’t know why he believes what he does. He spent years writing this book and can’t write a single chapter without totally bungling his own thoughts. I don’t have the page space to take down everything wrong here, so below are some hand-picked egregious takes:- Dave, like a lot of right-wingers, thinks that identity politics (grand political narratives about class, race, and gender) is a form of postmodernism (the rejection of grand political narratives). Additionally, Dave wants us to stop “hating western values," by embracing things like identity politics, postmodernism, and socialism. You’ll recall that these are western values, created and carried on by western European and American thinkers.- He argues the free market has done more for income redistribution than "the left" ever has. However, the period of lowest inequality in most capitalist countries was during the so-called ‘golden age of capitalism,’ in which Keynesian social democracy was the norm from the end of World War II until the free market reforms of the 80s, when inequality exploded everywhere they took hold. This upward explosion in inequality was also observed in former communist countries that underwent ‘Big Bang’ capitalist reforms.- Dave thinks socialist countries are ones in which governments ration everything. No, Dave doesn't know what market socialism or libertarian socialism are. Why would he? That would require him to consider fringe ideas outside his comfort zone.- Dave reports that more than half of hate crimes in America one year were intimidation, not assault. From this he extrapolates that these intimidations should not be considered serious or even be considered crimes because they are "just words."- I thought he wouldn't do it, but he did—Dave invokes MLK to say that he'd be disappointed with how it's now fashionable to discriminate based on skin color. MLK was a democratic socialist who railed against people like Dave in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. MLK was not against all discrimination, he was against discrimination that reduces the equity between races.- Dave pushes climate denial in the sheep’s clothing of ‘climate skepticism.’ He says we shouldn’t be concerned about the United Nations Climate Panel’s assessment that irreversible damage will be done by 2030 unless we take dramatic action. Among his arguments are that environmentalists must be exaggerating since the polar bear population has increased. I wish I was joking.- Dave’s argument that America cannot be an imperialist country is that we were founded in an act of revolt against an imperialist empire. This might be the worst argument in the entire book, if it weren't for this:- Dave believes the Nazis were socialist because they had Socialist in their party’s name, and calls socialism a “founding principle of the Nazi movement.” Never mind that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea isn’t democratic, or that one of the Nazi party’s primary goals was to crush communism, or that fascism is a right-wing ideology and everyone with one or more wrinkles on their brain knows this. There’s also the now-viral moment where Dave says Hitler was a leftist because he loved art and was vegetarian.DAVE RUBIN WROTE A BOOK THAT NO ONE COULD POSSIBLY LIKEJust to reiterate the point I’m supporting here:is shallow, poorly argued, and poorly researched. This book does not help right-wingers debate left-wingers and will not convince left-wingers to switch sides since he doesn’t engage with any of their actual objections to his regurgitated talking points. This means that Dave Rubin has effectively written a book that is completely useless to everyone.But whether you’re left or right, maybe you’re curious what such a person is like in his private life. The book opens with Dave talking about coming out in the early 2000s. I find coming-out stories inherently interesting, probably because I’ve never had to, myself, but there’s almost no real reflection from Dave—he’s actually using his coming out as gay to draw a parallel to coming out as conservative.There’s also a later section in which he recounts developing stress-induced alopecia because of the vitriol he received online, and feeling depressed almost to the point of quitting. Of course, he then uses this actually interesting personal struggle to encourage resilience from his fans when faced with leftist arguments. Don’t worry, Dave seems to say, just stick to your feelings and you’ll get through it. What a waste. He didn’t even use the experience as a way to talk about the difficulties of being an online political figure—a missed opportunity.In the last major section, Dave explains his relationship to his mentor, Jordan Peterson. This is the least ridiculous chapter (apart from the giant chasm separating what Dave says from what he does); he basically likes that Jordan tends to live according to his, which is fair enough. If you’re interested in what Dave has to say here, you should probably just check out that book instead. While bloated and full of dubious politics (lots of trojan-horsing religious and conservative ideology), it at least had a clear target audience and some positive value hidden within.RAVE DUBIN'S FEAR OF DEBATERave Dubin lives in his own world, where "the left" are all hysterical people with no grasp of history or economics getting triggered when you hit them with facts, but also have infiltrated the media and academia. He is clearly hoping you don’t notice that his book is a vast echo chamber and conservative safe space, because this fact runs completely counter to everything he claims to stand for.In one hilarious moment, he invites readers who disagree with him to contact him and to "start a conversation with someone of a different ideological background." Dave considers himself a free speech absolutist (despite opposing the NFL protests), who believes George Orwell would be “spinning in his grave” if he could see today’s SJWs shutting down speakers at college campuses. Dave, of course, omits that Orwell was a democratic socialist and later a libertarian socialist, and also does not explain why he overwhelmingly seems to platform conservatives and alt-righters he agrees with on his show.If Dave was truly interested in ideas and debate from “someone of a different ideological background,” then why has he continually ignored or declined requests from prominent left-wingers Sam Seder, David Pakman, Natalie Wynn, Steven Bonnell, Nathan J. Robinson, Ana Kasparian, and Kyle Kulinski to appear on his show? Is it because he knows he has no ideas of his own and would be inconsolably dumpstered?Dave’s so far called critical reviews ofthe work of trolls. He pre-emptively spends a lot of time in the book predicting that it will trigger the imaginary SJWs who live in his head. This must explain the scathing reviews he’s received from such communist troll publications asandCONCLUSIONis not worth reading. It is too shallow to benefit anyone. The book is blandly written and full of poor content. Its content and organization make for a repetitive experience. I don’t recommend reading it for comedy, because it is exhausting and boring, despite not being very long, with only sparse moments of laugh-out-loud unintentional comedy. (The book as a whole is quite humorless, even though Dave used to be a comedian.)In the end, you may be wondering why I read this and put so much effort into dumpstering Dave Rubin, a man who has been continually dumpstered into oblivion so much so that his own subreddit is now dedicated to making fun of him. I originally got this audiobook because I thought it would be funny to hear Dave lay out why he’s a total buffoon, while dropping hilarious unintentional memes like this excerpt from the introduction: https://imgur.com/sdnoDqN . But as I listened to him read, I was reminded that Dave made a lucrative career out of selling his show and soul to the right-wing. This book reminded me that millions of Americans still believe the things he does, and seek out his program to be comforted in knowing they don’t have to admit they might be wrong.Writing this review became a cathartic expression of my annoyance, but I will never read another book like this. I hope that Dave continues to get dumpstered by his critics. I hope that one day he’ll grow a spine, at least enough to cut himself off from his homophobic friends using him for exposure.