By Ethan Shattock

Many people claim that one of the driving forces behind Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was the emergence of a censorial leftism which “silenced” conservative opinions. Indeed there was some truth to this claim, with various speakers being banned from college campuses, and a number of high profile incidents on U.S campuses like at Yale, where a professor was derided for stating that students shouldn’t take offense as a result of Halloween costumes. Whether you see the veracity in the now many claims from the right that their opinions have been suppressed, one cannot deny that this has been a major factor in political discussions in the last few years.

We have seen so much of this stuff that it has created a massive repudiation movement filled with “disaffected leftists, centrists, right wingers” and people who generally just hated this new “safe space” and “trigger warning” culture. So much so, that many people decided to talk about it on news and tv shows. Some even created entire shows largely as a response. One of these shows was The Rubin Report. The host, Dave Rubin is a former member of TYT (The Young Turks) network, a leftist alternative media outlet. He started a new show about free speech because he was tired of political correctness and incessant whining from the left about how evil everyone was who didn’t agree with the progressive agenda.

He had author and neuroscientist Sam Harris on as his first guest in an episode which included a reflection on his heated exchange with Ben Affleck on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. It was a timely and interesting conversation and was the start of a new way of life for Rubin. He, a person on the left, began to establish a collegial dialogue with people on the right, without shouting each other down. To be fair to Rubin, he saw something of a niche in the political discourse market. In an environment of divisiveness and tribal politics, it was certainly refreshing to see a secular gay man on the left speak to religious right wingers, in a honest, open and civil way.

It would have been fine, if the ostensible theme of the show had actually been carried out in practice. After a strong start, what came next on the Rubin Report was an endless stream of guests focusing mainly on how terrible the left was. How ridiculous safe spaces and trigger warnings were, how progressives and feminists had “formed an alliance with Islam” and how people had become overcome with “Trump derangement syndrome”.

All you have to do is look at the list of guests on the show to know that there is almost complete ideological homogeneity aired in the videos posted. Rubin has had Ben Shapiro in the studio twice, Milo Yiannopoulos on the show twice, Dennis Prager twice, Larry Elder twice. He has also had people like Lauren Southern on the show, as well as Steven Crowder, Paul Joseph Watson and Katie Hopkins.

I know it may seem strange to focus so much on The Rubin Report and its host specifically , but I believe it represents an unfortunately large portion of the opposition to political correctness at the moment. The show has become insufferable. Dave Rubin has become insufferable. The hard thing to swallow is that I am someone who hates political correctness and the leftist groupthink as much as anyone. I hate how I always thought of “coloured person” as racist but now I’m being told that “person of colour” is the correct term. I hate how we have to talk about how sexist some of the angles in video games are, while women in other parts of the world are suffering violent acts of sexism in ways that preening narcissists in the West couldn’t even imagine. However now I have to admit just how odious the reaction to this has become. The Rubin Report , itself being a hub for people who hated political correctness, was a show that was founded on the idea of speaking in spite of political differences. The idea was to let different ideas get aired and an honest discussion and open debate could take place, free some censorial rules or ad hominem attacks.

But it hasn’t been like that at all. The guests mentioned are virtually all firmly on the right. He has also had people who were initially leftists who subsequently moved to the right, as well as neoconservatives like Douglas Murray on the show. Rubin’s fans will say that he does have people from the left on the show, or at least people not on the conservative side. However what you will notice is that many of the people who differ to the majority of his normal guests on things like gun control, abortion and taxation, will only be on the show largely to bash the left, which is at times the only the area of agreement between themselves and conservatives. For example, professor Jordan Peterson is not a standard conservative. However the main reason why he was on the show was to talk about ridiculous “gender bender activists” at his university that almost led to him losing his teaching position. Another guest Maajid Nawaz is someone who considers himself centre left, however he was on the show mainly to talk about how “dishonest” and “obscurantist” the left are in responding to radical Islam.

A fundamental point here is that the left are constantly being cast as this homogeneous group, almost as an abstraction, yet no person is ever on the show arguing leftist principles and policies. You never see guests on the show who are progressive and explain why they think single payer healthcare would be a good system, or why the tax code shouldn’t disproportionately favour the 1%. I haven’t heard people who actually do believe in safe spaces and trigger warnings and articulate why they think that way. These people are out there. There are many progressive voices who argue points well and really outline why leftist policies are good. The Rubin Report is crying out for some intellectual diversity, but either Dave doesn’t care about that and is instead focused on pleasing his anti-left wing audience, or he is simply doing what he is told by libertarian think tanks who apparently contribute a lot to his Patreon funding.

The other salient point here is to do with Dave himself. Now he has been unfairly labelled “far-right” by leftist journalists, while others have even called him “alt-right”. This opinion could only come from someone who has never listened to Rubin himself. He’s not a bad person. He is in fact, when it comes to interviewing, a spineless person. He has had many occasions where he has not challenged his conservative guests , many of whom deny the existence of climate change. He has refused to press or challenge his most controversial guests on their extremely incendiary comments, some of which were made in his studio. Katie Hopkins was not questioned about any of the truly egregious statements she has made, including the infamous “final solution” tweet. Milo, during an interview said that it shouldn’t be a surprise that Muslims blew up an airport in Brussels because it’s just “what they do”. Paul Joseph Watson was not questioned at all about some of the highly conspiratorial claims he has acceded to in the past. There are obvious lines being crossed, and statements which don’t deserve to go unchecked are going unchecked. Lauren Southern, Canadian nationalist said that Richard Spencer was “misrepresented” and that he was “not a white supremacist” but a “white nationalist”, as if that distinction negates the toxic white identity politics that Spencer espouses. Rubin did not press this statement in the slightest. He also constantly contradicts himself, saying on one hand that he is a “classical liberal” while also claiming he is “basically for single payer healthcare”. When asked about the policy incongruity here, he merely shrugged it off and started speaking about how awful college campuses are. He claims that there’s “virtually no one on the right who cares about gay marriage anymore”. This is either ignorance or dishonesty. Many on the right do not support gay marriage and there have been legislative attempts at state level to frustrate the Supreme Court decision. In addition, it forgets the obvious reality that many on the right accept gay marriage only because it is now the law of the land and they would have a hard time trying to change it back at this stage. Political movements have wins and losses, and many simply accept that they have lost in certain issues and move on. Dave disregards this, instead moving on to lambast the very movement that fought for his right to marry.

It’s excruciating to watch this once interesting and stimulating show essentially become a right wing/libertarian echo chamber. If you hate leftism and want to vent about it, get on The Rubin Report. If you’re tired of the “liberal agenda”, get on The Rubin Report. However if you actually want to challenge libertarian ideas and make a passionate case for leftism, there’s a good chance you won’t get an invite. The way many fans of the Rubin Report respond to criticism really show that many of them aren’t actually interested in the open exchange of ideas. Many of these people who oppose “PC culture” in reality just want their own group where they can rally against the other side, and dismiss dissenting ideas in the exact same manner for which they criticised the left. The antidote to this does exist, in the form of getting both critics of Rubin and his guests’ beliefs on the show. Names? Sure. Sam Seder, Glen Greenwald, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Jeremy Scahill, Reza Aslan, Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, Abbie Martin, maybe even Noam Chomsky. These are people that disagree with the things Rubin’s guests say and are not afraid to challenge people. And I can almost guarantee you that not one of these people will ever be invited on the show.

What the rotting of the Rubin Report shows is that so much of the opposition to politically correct cultural authoritarianism is not smart, nor is it interesting. It is a movement based almost purely on opposition, and while there are some principles to it, they are rarely acted out with consistency. Many of the “anti- pc” brigade now have the same victim complex that they admonished the left for exhibiting for so long. “Everyone’s a sexist, you have white privilege, you can’t speak here” has now met its match in “Everybody’s a regressive, you don’t let me speak, go back to your safe spare”. It’s insipid, it’s petulant, and in many cases is actually quite narcissistic. This is seen in the form of the free speech debates surrounding college campuses. Many on the right are now equating not being given a platform when invited for a speech to not being invited for a speech in the first place. This is a ridiculous false equivalence. Not being asked to do a speech because of your views is entirely different to not being allowed to speak. You have a right to free speech, you do not have a right to simply be invited to speak wherever and whenever you see fit.

It really represents an admission from people like me who do genuinely detest so much of the modern offense taking culture, and lack of honest open dialogue. The admission being that the PC authoritarians and their enemies are really cut from the same cloth. They both have a lot of hatred in them, they don’t like speaking to people who disagree with them and they spend so long moaning about how victimised and oppressed they are. It turns out that an opposition to group think can in many cases bring about more group think. Some of the specific ideas may be different, but so many of the general principles coincide. It’s difficult to reconcile a contempt for the kinds of things that many on the modern social justice left proclaim with a realisation that so much of this idiocy also exists on the other side. The irony is for shows like the Rubin Report, the vehement opposition of the left has forced some people like me to go elsewhere to get different perspectives on politics, and has in fact shifted some of my own beliefs to the left. In hindsight, this shouldn’t be a surprise. When you create your own safe space where no other mean ideas can get in, you often prompt some people to go off and explore the other side out of frustration. This obviously works both ways. I still have a number of criticisms of the progressive left, however it seems that the inability to tolerate free speech is really now a symptom of some of their strongest opponents.