Open Mic Night at the Biden School with MAGA firebrand Dave Rubin

Biden School Opens Doors to Critic Dave Rubin and me

Welcome back to The Red Letter. As a reminder, you can listen to the above debate with Dave Rubin at the Biden School on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music.

Every day, more details drip, drip, drip out about President Joe Biden’s desperate attempt to hold onto his presidency, as well as the truth about his degenerating condition. Today, it was the blockbuster reporting from Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s book Original Sin that Biden’s wobbly gait wasn’t about his unhealed broken foot, as the White House had insisted, but spinal degeneration. In fact, his team was preparing for the day that he would have to be in a wheelchair because they were so worried he would fall, and they were hoping they could push it off until after the campaign. By the afternoon, Axios released another damaging detail from the book—George Clooney’s “holy shit” moment when the former president couldn’t remember him at a fundraiser. This is what prompted Clooney to write that New York Times op-ed calling on him to drop out of the race.

The press has been so damaging that the Bidens hired former White House aide Chris Meagher to help them navigate crisis communications during this thorny time. Their attempt at damage control—a joint Jill-and-Joe interview on The View—backfired when Alyssa Farah Griffin asked if the reports of his cognitive decline were wrong. Jill had to step in to save him, because it wasn’t pretty.

So that’s why I was surprised, but impressed, when the Biden School at the University of Delaware, where Biden’s sister Valerie sits on the board and has a strong hand over the school, invited me and right-wing influencer Dave Rubin to speak at their Media and Democracy Summit last Tuesday. I’ve never been one to carry water for the administration, and on Rubin’s YouTube show The Rubin Report with nearly three million subscribers, he regularly mocks the president, calling him a hypocrite and labeling his administration a “prolonged national nightmare” and “utter farce.”

Hosting the two of us was letting a couple of foxes into the tent, and I give Valerie and the Biden family credit for having that open conversation in the spirit of democracy. After all, our current administration is hobnobbing in Saudi Arabia with Mohammed Bin Salman, who brutally dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, and is also at war with the Associated Press for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

I was even more surprised when they let us on stage with just two microphones and no moderator.

“I suppose it's slightly uncomfortable to talk about here,