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The Rubin Report
Oxford Union Speech: The Only Thing Worse Than Being Censored Is This | Dave Rubin
00:10:13
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Thank you guys. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. And actually talking about free speech is literally my favorite thing to do. So we have 12 minutes to do my favorite thing. I try never to give the same speech twice because exercising free speech is a good exercise in how you use your mind and how you think and how you breathe actually, and how you communicate with people. And I was on the way here from London, I was in the car and I was thinking, well, what would I want to talk about at Oxford when we're talking about cancel culture and free speech? And it hit me that this is a thousand year old institution, a thousand year old institution that you all have the privilege of going to. That over decades and literally hundreds of years, people have battled ideas, they've battled ideas about science and religion and philosophy and history and politics and everything else. And sometimes people won those battles, sometimes they thought they won those battles, sometimes they lost those battles, sometimes the battles went to a draw. But usually what probably happened here and what hopefully still happens here is that your professors and you guys then sit down and have a drink after you've battled it out, right? That you say what you think and someone else says what they think and you might disagree, hopefully you disagree. You're not going to believe this. There's an awful lot of people on this planet and they think an awful lot of different things. And if you're looking to find people that think something different than you and take them out or oh, they didn't evolve to that very erudite opinion that you got to the moment you got there, you're gonna take out an awful lot of people. And that's how really bad things happen. You know, upstairs earlier we had a dinner with about a hundred of you guys and we toasted to free speech at the end. And I'm pretty sure everybody clinked their glass and toasted to free speech. And then I thought, well, now I'm coming downstairs to have to defend free speech. That's rather odd. I spent most of the dinner chatting with my new friend, your treasurer, Sarah over there. And it became fairly obvious to me in about 45 minutes of talking to her that we have some pretty disagreements about things. She thinks, and this is crazy to me, but she thinks that Allen Iverson was the best basketball player of the early 2000s. It was obviously Kobe Bryant. Now, should we still let her up there? I think so. Now that's obviously a silly example, but we can extrapolate that to everything that has happened in society over the last Couple decades. You know, you guys are young. I'm not that old. I'm only 48. But I'm starting to feel old when I come to colleges. And I grew up before this thing and before this thing that you're all walking around in your pocket with. Before this thing, if you had something bad to say about somebody, you basically had to say it to their face and you might get punched. And you know what? It was probably good. It was probably good. That's how you dealt with bullies. But. But what has happened in an era and at a time when you can be anonymous and you can, which, by the way, I'm for anonymity, and anonymity is an important part of speech. But when you can be anonymous and you can have burner accounts and you can mob people and you can go after their work and their livelihoods and their families, we have weaponized the mob to a point that good, decent people, including you, including your parents, including your grandparents and your friends and your family are silencing themselves. And that is way more dangerous than someone else coming to silence you. We have done this to ourselves in the west, people that live in closed societies where they don't have free speech would kill, literally kill to be having a debate about whether cancel culture should exist or not. Because they live in a place that canceling basically means you get beheaded. And here we are in a place where we can debate these ideas. We can debate rather intense topics. So, for example, let's do one right now. There are biological differences between men and women. A man cannot become a woman. That is the truth. That is a biological reality. Now, I would treat someone who told me that they were trans or felt that their gender did not match with their biological reality. I would treat someone that told me that with respect, as long as they treated me with respect. And if someone's over 18 and wants to do whatever they want to do with their body, so be it. You want to dress a certain way, change your name, all of those things, that's just fine. And that's the exchange that we have in a Western society, in a free society, right, that you can live the way you want, but what you can't do is force other people to respect you. You can't force other people to bend the knee and bow to you and demand it. And if they don' you are going to take them out, you are going to destroy them. You are going to make sure they don't have a job. You're going to make sure that they can't Post online or whatever else it might be. We could do many, many examples of this. Guys, we just lived through three, four, five crazy years of COVID where people like my friend Naomi here were canceled because of talking about vaccine hesitancy and things of this nature, while the machine, the system that I think the people on the opposition side of this seem to want to uphold, actually, while they're telling you that they're not upholding it, the system lied to us about almost everything as it pertained to vaccines, as it pertained to six feet, social distancing, staying at home, and there were some brave people out there. I like to include myself in that group that pushed back against it, said, no, no, no, no, no. Something's not right here. You have no right to tell me that I have to inject myself with something or that I have to wear a mask when I'm seated, but I can take it off when I stand up or I can't send my kid to. To school or the litany of other things. But that's what we subjected ourselves to. And then it was weaponized online with these mobs, and we all know it's not right. So to defend free speech against cancel culture is literally the easiest thing to do in a room with 500 or so people. Because what I'm doing up here, actually, is defending every single one of you. Every single one of you, whatever your most ridiculous, nonsensical buffoonish thought might be. And by the way, I've got them, too. I will defend your right to say it. And there seems to be a little confusion as well as it pertains to words and violence. Words are words. That's it. That's all they are. It's on you guys if they're going to offend you, and it's on you if it's going to trigger you. And it's on you if you need a warning before you go into a classroom or anything else. Words are words. That you probably should have learned that in about fourth grade, and that's a bigger condemnation of our education system than it is of any of you guys. But words are not violence. Nothing that Kanye west said in that ridiculous, that absurdly offensive and racist Twitter tirade that he had two weeks ago. None of that was violence. And would it do us any better to stop him from saying those things? Of course not. What would it do? Would he really stop doing it? He wouldn't. It would just move. It would just move, right? And especially again, guys, connect this to the world that you live in right now, what we're doing in this room, sitting here, having an open, honest exchange with human beings in a room, is becoming increasingly rare. And the more it becomes rare, the more difficult it will be ever to exchange an idea in an honest way. Because you will not know if you're talking to a real person. You will not know if you're talking to a bot. You will not know if you're talking to just a troll or anything else. So the only way we can hash through any, literally any of the problems that you think might be the problems of the day, whether you think it's about gender or sexuality, or you think it's about race, or you think it's about a conflicted history of your country or whatever it might be, the only way we will churn through any of that is, is through your ability to say what you think and say it earnestly and fight for it with everything that you've got. That's what your ancestors did. That's what built an incredible country like this. That's what built an incredible country like where I come from. And if we give that away because we might be offended by a little something and somebody upset us and we start looking at each other just as groups instead of people, it's all over. So I will always defend the most precious, beautiful thing that there is, which is the individual, that is you. And that's why I would love to cancel cancel culture. So thank you very much.