Many of his guests were people you could almost never come across in mainstream media, but they were mostly fun, irreverent, and delightfully heterodox. Gay Christians, black conservatives, disheveled academics, bow-tied libertarians, maverick scientists, stand-up comedians, Twitter-trolls, constitutional lawyers, female anti-feminists, wayward philosophers, polyamorous evolutionary biologists, transvestites, anarchists, crypto-currency evangelists, you name it. But along and among them were also a large number of very serious people, many of my favorites: Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins. Every now and then, there were some sleazy guys, but at least of the more entertaining sort.
When Trump broke into our world, Dave didn't hold a firm opinion about him. He seemed to understand him to be a vile conman, but he was also infatuated with the idea that the mainstream media and politics are irreparably broken, and Trump might be just the right tool to wreck it, so something better can be built on the ruins.
The opinions that Trump would be a force for good in any sense, I held as a colossal error of judgment even then. And while the mainstream media has moved way too far to the left for me, burning it down along with the entire political culture seemed like an incredibly inane and simplistic thought. But people can hold many contradicting ideas in their heads at the same time, and very smart individuals sometimes have a few very stupid ones.
The other thing that has irked me a bit about the Rubin Report is Dave's instinctive eagerness to agree with his guests. But Dave wanted to facilitate conversation between the two warring tribes, and if the price for it was letting some absurd opinions go unchallenged, then so be it, I thought.
When the long-form conversation started to gain popularity, Dave Rubin was one of the main driving forces behind it, and for that, he deserves credit (and Joe Rogan deserves enormous). The phenomenon escaped from the podcast-world into the real one. Debates like the ones between Harris and Peterson could fill arenas around the world, and Rubin took part in many as the moderator.
And I think this was the pinnacle of his career, and something he can be rightly proud of. But at the same time, the guest-menu of his own show started to lose its diversity. The entrance criteria seemed to filter less and less for being novel and interesting, and instead, Dave was eager to invite basically anyone who had something bad to say about liberals, and/or something good about Trump. That was the time when I stopped watching the show. I still kept it in my news feed, and from time to time checked whether the current guest is someone worth listening to. Maybe one or two came along in the course of a year. And then, when Dave hosted Donald Trump Jr., it was the end for me.
Not for Dave, though. Starting from being a left-wing dissenter and cautious right-wing explorer, he ended up being a full-throated Trump-supporter and - to the surprise of no one - a COVID-denier. Today, after the elections, he is one of the loudest high-profile spreaders of election-stealing hoaxes and COVID-denialism. And also someone who gets denounced by an ever-growing list of former friends. Sam Harris just announced that he doesn't wish to be associated with the Intellectual Dark Web anymore (not explicitly but clearly referring to Rubin), and people in that circle have been making similar noises recently (a sigh of relief here).
This is a personal tragedy of a life having gone terribly astray, but also something that can offer some general insight. My brief opinion is that Dave Rubin is a guy with a good heart, limited intellect, good intentions, and bad company. It started well. David came away from the leftist worldview he held for many years and he had a void and the need to fill it. After spending enough time with Jordan Peterson, the former atheist started to believe in God. Talking with libertarians all the time made him denounce government as a whole. Confronting left-wing idiotism every day led him to Trump. By the time the pandemic came, he didn't even need moderate lockdown-skeptics to nudge him along the wrong way. He was already in sprint in that direction when the start pistol went off.
Dave is not dumber than the next guy, but he never had strong moral foundations or a clear perspective on politics and economics (or anything, for that matter). He went out into the dangerous world of wild ideas and magnetic personalities defenseless. Being in the company of very serious intellects clearly flattered him. He always made the impression of a starry-eyed boy who was drinking the words of charismatic adults. As one of the critics of his book (don't read it) put it, it is a coming-of-age story of someone who never grew up. Even in his better moments, he is parroting back half-digested ideas he heard from people he considers smarter than himself (he is right about that). In his worst moments, he is really at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
My take on Rubin might be naive, but I prefer the charitable interpretation. If someone presents himself already in such a bad light, what's the reason to attribute further malice to him, especially, when plain stupidity is a satisfying explanation for his choices?
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