The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 513. Hollywood Undone and the Return to Comedy | Rob Schneider

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Jordan Peterson sits down with actor, author, and comedian Rob Schneider. They discuss the unpredictable changes to both major political parties during the last presidential election, the fall of Hollywood and celebrity culture (by their own hand), how new and independent media finally broke the machine, and why Rob began speaking politically in spite of personal cost and sacrifice. Rob Schneider is an accomplished actor, comedian, screenwriter, and director. A stand-up comic and veteran of the award-winning NBC sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live,” Schneider has gone on to a successful career in films, television, and continues his worldwide stand-up tour. This episode was filmed on November 25th, 2024.  | Links | For Rob Schneider: “You Can Do It!: Speak Your Mind, America” is on sale now https://a.co/d/5tP1vbW On X https://x.com/RobSchneider?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/iamrobschneider/?hl=en 

When there was only 200 odd million people in America, they would all watch the Academy Awards. And happily! Everyone was thrilled to do it. And then what happened was, they started making these decisions. You cannot win an Academy Award unless you have 40% LGBTQ, unless you have people of a certain percentage of color. The crew is this. And so from that, I think it became an easy kind of pincer move. It just kind of continued closing the door quicker. It's a pronounced minority of people in the world who have anything approximating the right to free speech. So the fact that we take it for granted is something

like a miracle. What happens is there becomes a THE machine that comes into place and that takes advantage of certain situations like this. That doesn't want to go away because that machine is making money. When the king dies, chaos breaks out everywhere. It's like the rise of a hydra. Something like that seems to be occurring in the West since about 2012. The system is crumbling. If this doesn't change, nothing else matters.

This shit has to stop. MUSIC So I had the opportunity today to sit down in Scottsdale, Arizona, with Rob Schneider, and Rob's been, what, stand-up comedian, a movie star, an author. He's got this new book called You Can Do It entitled You Can Do It. So we discussed his book. We discussed, well, to some degree, the origins of comedy in Hollywood and the collapse of the Hollywood star system. We talked about the direction in which entertainment is likely to go in the near future.

We talked about the role of Hollywood in its own demise, preferring the politically correct pathway to the pathway of genuine artistic commitment and also genuine humor. We talked about our hopes that maybe that is coming to an end. Our curiosity about what the comedians, especially the successful comedians on the center right, let's say the podcasters, for example, who've been spectacularly successful over the last five or six years,

what they're going to turn to now in the aftermath of the Trump victory, what role are the comedians as critics going to play now that the tide has turned and there's a new king in town, so to speak. So that's going to be very interesting. We talked about, well, we talked about Rob's book, which is a testament to the power of free speech. We talked about the fact that he decided to turn in the conservative direction

for a liberal relatively early on in the course of the culture war, really starting to get involved in the political and not in the typical Hollywood manner by about 2014. And we discussed why that happened and what it meant and what the consequences have been for his career and potentially for the future. So join us for that.

So I've been making my way through this, You Can Do It, and I want to ask you some questions about what I derived from reading it. So it seems to me to be fair to say that you're part of the club of, what would you say, unwitting and surprised conservatives. Yes. Right? I mean, you characterize yourself in the book as a classic liberal. That's always how I've thought of myself. Although I would say I'm more conservative in my views than

I was 10 years ago. That might be age to some degree, because people do get more conservative as they get older. But I think so. I've thought through conservatism a bit more and realized why I'm more conservative than I thought. Or maybe I realized under what conditions classic liberalism still retains its function. So anyways, you describe yourself as a classic liberal.

I do. Well, I think it's important to terms seem to be, as you well know, seem to be an imposition for people. In other words, they want to, in this tribal nature that we find ourselves in our society, people seem to group themselves and identify themselves very strongly, whether it's liberalism speaks to young people. Whereas, and what I want to do is,

because I think of words have been manipulated and have been bastardized. Bastardized. Like, you know. That's what universities are for. They're to bastardize words. Well, the word Nazi has gone from someone who is a member of the National Socialist Party and someone who is a, or a neo-Nazi, who is someone who still adheres to the policies

of some things that are the National Socialists and the anti-Semitism and so forth. But now it has devolved to the point,'re a Nazi if you have taking up two parking spaces with your Elon Musk new truck. Or if you disagree with Joey Reed. You're a Nazi, definitely. So to get people over the fence, I like to just challenge them or just tell them there's no such thing as conservatives anymore. Yeah.

There's just liberals that aren't crazy. Yeah. And they go, well, what does that mean? Well, what is traditional liberalism? And if I am traditional liberalism, I think you'd have to define it as someone who is for civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, equality, don't judge a person by the color of their skin. It's pretty basic traditional liberalism.

Free speech, unfettered free speech, debate, discourse, let the best idea rise to the surface. That's traditional liberalism. If you want to call that conservatism now, but I prefer to say we're traditional liberals that just aren't crazy. Yeah. Okay. So let's delve into that a little bit. I mean, I think one of the compelling differences or the compelling definitional features of classic liberalism is the insistence that it's the individual, that human beings should be regarded as individuals first and foremost, right? Is that the fact of your singular individuality is the defining hallmark of your identity.

Yes, I agree. Okay, and I think both conservatism and progressivism can, what would you say, diverge from that. The progressives diverge in that they insist that group identity trumps individual identity, but the conservatives have that proclivity too, right? Because they might prioritize, especially the more traditional conservative types, as you move farther to the right, they might prioritize religious faith or national identity.

And I certainly have always believed that the primary level of analysis when you're dealing with human beings should be the individual. But one of the things that I've wrestled with in the last 10 years is maybe the realization that that only works if the bedrock of society is in place. Right, so when the Scots invented liberalism, I think that's a reasonable historical proclamation. There was some unstated elements to their liberalism, and the unstated element was, well, we all share a set of presumptions that we don't have to talk about.

We hold these things as self-evident, right, like the founders of the United States. And if that's the case and remains the case, then we can be free and be defined as individualism. Right, but a nationalism does come into play and is important when the nation is attacked, when you do feel that the nation is under threat. The nationalism is important. However, the individual must always, the individualism and the rights of the individual must take precedence.

Yeah. Always. But I felt like the state was under attack. You did feel like some of the foundational principles of our country recently was under attack. The attack on freedom of speech, which is something that you just, you know, moving on in your 20s and 30s, you just think it's never, it's not going to be an issue in your life. That your freedom to speak your mind is going to be something, especially someone who is in the public eye and is a comedian.

Right. You would think that would be something you would be... That you'd take for granted. Yeah. This is something that has always been, you make the assumption, and then it's always gonna continue. You don't realize that it was something from 1791 in the United States, and the citizen and the rights of man in France,

it was 1789, it lasted for the free speech in France, lasted for four years before they started cutting off people's heads again. Well, in the United States, it's lasted a long time. So it has become something that we did take for granted. So when it was attacked in relatively short order during the pandemic, you realize that this is not something that is just gonna take care of itself.

That it's just a piece of paper, ultimately our constitution and our bill of rights. And if people don't stand up for it, yes, they can be taken away. And when you have potential leaders like Kamala Harris and Tim Wall's paper say that the free speech, our right to free speech is a privilege, not a guaranteed fundamental. Yeah, something attributed to people by the state. Yeah, I mean you can have a privilege as a driver's license. You can have, you can, congratulations, you've passed the test.

Yeah. You can drive it, but if you're, they can take your driver's license away if you drink and drive. Especially if you do it several times. So if you speak and drive. Yeah, they can take it away. Speak and drink, I guess it is, yeah. I didn't think it was something that I needed to worry about. So as a comedian, I just assumed that this was just going to continue.

However, with the consolidation of powers, especially in the tech industries, with these so-called liberals in mostly in Northern California, they seemed to have got a grip on the culture and on communication and on power and the consolidation of that. And that became something when they started to make decisions that affected the society at large. That was something that... So was it specifically the pandemic for you that was the wake-up call? I think it was coming before that.

Yeah, okay. I think it did come before that. I think you don't realize the tentacles that really... When they say it's an oligarchy, remember Noam Chomsky says the United States is an oligarchy. It was like, oh, no, it's not. It's a constitutional republic. What does he mean?

Well, he means that there are centers of power that are controlling how our government works. It's the underpinnings of it. And those people don't leave. So when the pharmaceutical industry can buy off or can pay and be the largest contributor to not only a federal, a senator on the federal level or a congressman, but also on the state level, then that is power. When they can actually write the legislation and hand it to a state legislature through the medical board that they control, all of a sudden these freedoms that I just assumed we had are illusory.

And we are told what to do by this group. So that was a point to me around 2014 where I realized that there really was a problem, a fundamental problem. And then when Obama put in, allowed to have propaganda within the United States from government agencies in 2013. And what are you referring to there? Well, they had, well, there was always, you could, the CIA and the spy agencies could always

need to use propaganda for other countries, but then there was... Oh, yes. They had legislation passed in 2013. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name now. I'll come up with it. But whether that propaganda could actually happen to Americans in America. So that was seemed to be... That was different.

I mean, it goes back to Woodrow Wilson, where he ran on, I kept us out of war. And as soon as he got reelected, he got us into war. And then there was the propaganda that through Congress, it was approved that they could use propaganda in the United States. And so what you really had, you had the burning of Belgian babies and you had this, you know, the Hun is doing these horrible things that they weren't doing and it was propaganda. But you know, because you have to think about during World War I, Americans were mostly all farmers and like Europe was way over there.

They have their hogs and their pigs to deal with and their farm. They don't want to get involved in that war. So isolationism was not only a defendable but a practical foreign policy at the time. And so Woodrow Wilson wanted to change that and did very effectively, but he did it through propaganda. So you start to see, when you start to see propaganda under Obama, and then you kind of see the shift. And I think Douglas Murray talks about pretty, you know, in a beautiful way, he describes how we have,

when things have never been better with race, they try to convince you it's never been worse. So we had, so I noticed these things happening. It's a funny thing. It was coming together, but it wasn't all. It didn't coalesce till the pandemic. There's a very old idea that you see replicated in mythological stories and fairy tales and so forth very frequently,

that when the king dies, let's say, that chaos breaks out everywhere. It's like the rise of a hydra, right? Serpent with a multitude of heads. And something like that seems to be occurring in the West that's accelerated since about 2012. Maybe it's a consequence of the insistence that the patriarchal order should dissolve. That's like a variant of the idea that God is dead, the central patriarchal or paternal authority the central patriarchal or paternal authority disappears. And the delusional presumption is

that the consequence of that dissolution will be the flowering of a kind of untrammeled freedom. But the reality is the dissolution into something like a warring oligarchy, where there's multiple sources of power, and they're all, what would you say, they're all vying in their particular way for supremacy, and there's a totalitarian spirit that emerges out of that that's very much antithetical to anything approximating freedom.

What I saw was a push to say that the Western world is shit, and everything we've done is garbage, and that there really are no rights, and that all these other people are being oppressed. And I went like, I don't see that. But what that really was was an attack by bad faith actors. So when you see this kind of coming together, and I go, how is this going to work its way out? Because it seems like pretty obvious to me these are

bad faith actors because Western civilization has created wonderful things. And especially comparatively speaking. Yeah. I mean, what is the alt, what is the- What's the actual alternative? Yeah. What is it? And- It's not hippies traipsing through the woods and engaging in free love. It's not that.

It's dynasty and oligarchy and authoritarianism and terror. And in the guise of this utopia, I mean, it's going to be a wonderful thing. What you have now is garbage. This, this, you don't really have freedom. You have your freedom. You don't even know that you're oppressing these other people. That was the one that got me.

You are in a system of oppression and you're an unknowing, you're an unknowing participant oppressing these other people. Yeah, yeah. And I would like- You can thank the universities for that. Yeah. Feminization, definitely. Yeah. And so from that, I think it became an easy kind of pincer move when the pandemic came in to just kind of continue closing the door quicker.

So with our rights being taken away. And you know, the Constitution and the founding fathers had a plague at the time of the revolution, but they didn't stop. They didn't stop trying to get rid of the Brits at the time. So we gotta, let's call a timeout here on the revolution because we're having a smallpox epidemic, so we're going to ask for a cessation of hostilities. No. So as a matter of fact,

the Constitution was really, it was built for problems. Right. And the worst of times. There was nothing to suspend it. But it can be done. And quite quickly. And it will. And most people will go along with it. And most people not- And quite quickly. And it will. And nothing's- And most people will go along with it. And most people go along with it. At least under some circumstances, yeah. Yeah, and what is the percentage of those people and who are those people?

You kind of saw it. There seems to be a third of these and the Stanley Milgram study kind of points out that there are people, and you would hope that you wouldn't be one of them, who would just keep, you know, they experiment. There's a guy in the other room, and you know the experiment for some of your listeners

who don't. Stanley Milgram would have somebody, an authority figure in a white coat, and he'd be asking to push a button, and there'd be somebody in another room screaming through a glass. And so keep pushing, keep pushing it. Turn it up. Turn it up to the point.

And even to the point of death, they would, there was an astounding 65% of the people went along with it. Now that study had some particular problems, but the majority of it, I think, still holds. That people will go along if the authorities tell them to do something. And I think if anything, the pandemic proved that, again,

that how well do would you behave in this situation? And you saw people that behaved well and people that didn't, people that were going to be who finally in a position to be bullies, finally in position to crush other people and did. I remember in Australia seeing somebody getting tackled and thrown to the ground by this brute just for the offense of not having a mask. I mean, maybe he could be asked to leave if that's the law of the land. Maybe he can be asked to go outside or maybe he can be provided with a mask in that particular

environment. However, for him to be tackled, thrown onto the ground, given a concussion seems to be a bit of an over reaction. Yeah. So basically, your observation is that a variety of, there were a variety of causal factors that gave rise to what happened during the pandemic and the pandemic crystallized it. It did. Yeah.

It's always there. Right. Well, the potential for society to always get to a, to an ugly place, I would say, to a place. As you point out in your book, it's a pronounced minority of people in the world who have anything approximating the right to free speech. Right, that's very rare.

So the fact that we take it for granted is something like a miracle. It's a foolish miracle in a way, because the fact that it's barely existed throughout human history and barely exists now attests to the difficulty of establishing a state where that's the expectation. And keeping it. I mean, we've had 117 billion people who've been alive in the history of the world, of those, how few were able to be granted the grace and the great gift of being able to speak their mind.

And that was what's so interesting about the United States and why Alexander de Tocqueville really appreciated America was here was this these group of farmers basically ignorant farmers who were able to say that they're people who ran their government were fools and idiots and were able to speak their mind. I mean, that was something for somebody from coming from France and not too far removed from Napoleon seemed to be a unique civilization. So I think... See, it's a funny thing too, because it isn't only that you have the right

to free speech. It's actually because you would only characterize it that way if you believe that free speech was something like a hedonic pleasure, right? I can say whatever I want. Yeah. But that underplays the importance of the principle because you have a responsibility to free speech

and the fact that you can speak freely might be desirable to you and it might even make you happy, although sometimes it wouldn't. Provide a living too. Yes, for you. Well, yeah, for anybody creative, which is a crucial thing to understand, right? Creative people only have the freedom

of their creative expression. That's what they have to offer. But part of the, there's a huge advantage to me that you have the right to free speech because I get to hear what you think. And so if you're wrong, I can learn how things are wrong. And if you're right, then I can listen to you and not have to suffer through whatever you had to suffer through to become wise in that manner.

Right? Well, I'm pointing this out because we make a big mistake when we think of the right to free speech as a hedonic right. Right. That's what I was expressing. It's way more important. It is. Well, it's actually a tool and it really is the primary defensive weapon of our citizenry

that we have. I mean, that's why it is the First Amendment. They could have made it the second. They could have put guns first. But the founding fathers actually thought that even more than guns, the way to protect our citizenry and our republic from tyranny was unfettered free speech. Well, it's also the way to ensure that not only that society is protected from tyranny, but that it thrives. Because they're, like, from a psychological perspective, there's very little difference between freedom of speech and the right to think. And thought is how you adapt to changing circumstances.

And so the fact that the United States is the most dynamic economy in the world is a direct consequence of the fact that free speech rights are so well protected here, because there can be people like Elon Musk here. Right. Right, and he's firing in 15 directions at the same time. Right. And he can do that. Because?

Well, because, yeah, because the right is established, and the consequence of that is that we all benefit from it. We do. Well, you cannot innovate unless you have the ability. Yeah, right. Exactly. You can't create and you can't, if you're thinking about your own limitations. And that's why, you know, China doesn't have the same amount of Nobel laureates as the West, and we do in the West.

Because they're good at stealing IP. They're very good, yes. Yes, very good. But I mean, that's what was so worrisome to me is that the, you know, the neocons who, we don't really know who has been running the country, the United States government. We know it's not Biden. You don't think it's Biden? Yeah.

We know it's not Biden from his beach chair in a very ugly beach in Delaware. If you're the president of the United States, go to Florida, go to Hawaii, go to the Bahamas. Don't go to your beach in Delaware. If you're the president of the United States, go to Florida. Go to Hawaii, go to the Bahamas. Don't go to your beach in Delaware. It seems a very sad beach. A very dreary kind of beach. The sand isn't very nice. There's not a lot of it.

It's mostly rocks. And then there's, you know, the foliage of the beach, which is also very ugly. So... Now all the people in Delaware are very unhappy with you. Well, they should go to Florida for a pleasant beach. So who was running? Who was running the government?

We don't know. And we have a right to know. Junior staffers educated at Ivy League universities. Yeah, well, I'm afraid that that's more true than we might think. I think we have a right to know. And it's the idea that somehow you don't, and that the Democrats are like, don't worry, we're going to do what's best for you. We have the right. And at the same time, we're going to fly in Haitians in the middle of the night, and we're

going to just set up so that makes sure that the next election cycle, Ohio, will turn. It just turned blue completely. It was just so blatant that finally Americans had had enough. Yeah, thank God. And it was really, and I think what's important for the world too, because I do see, you know, I always thought the parliamentary system was great because it's so fast. I mean, you can act quickly. Like for instance, when I was making a movie in Amsterdam, people were able to complain

to parliament very quickly so that I couldn't shoot the next day in the same location. So it's very responsive. But the good thing about this republic is that we really do have these safeguards that are pretty strong. Like for instance, you don't hear any Democrats today talking about expanding the Supreme Court or about abandoning the filibuster because they're no longer in power. Right, right. So there's no call for that.

But those are safeguards, you know, and we do have a system. It is susceptible to bad faith actors, for sure, especially in our culture, in the broad culture. But in our government itself, it's a pretty good system. I mean, the Supreme Court, that is a good backstop for a lot of the craziness that can be tried by our government. It is the last gasp, and they do have to respond to that. And so, unfortunately, since 9-11 though,

that's one of the things that I think have led to our particular problems that we've had now and our attack on our republic is the Congress has abdicated their legislative powers and they've just given it to the president because of the Patriot Act. So basically the Patriot, I mean, the founding fathers had never designed our government to, for the president, to just, you know, rule as an emperor.

Yeah, well it's an odd thing that the worst possible consequence of a terrorist attack is that it isn't the attack itself, it's the reaction to the attack that makes the attack successful. Well, I mean, a lot of, well, you know, I hate airports. I hate them. I was unbearable to travel with my wife for like 10 years. We finally figured out how to work it out. But every time I went into an airport after 9-11, I thought they're training everybody to accept the doctrines of a totalitarian state. You have to line up like sheep to do stupid things that mean nothing, that give you the illusion of security, implemented by faceless authoritarians,

and then acted out by powerless minions. And then you get used to it. Well, that's the problem. That's what they want. Everybody goes through airports and so I think that you can see the, what would you say, the deterioration, the forefront of the authoritarian movement is in airports and you can see that right now because now increasingly as you board a plane

they want to take your photo. I say no to that. I know. You can't refuse it. So far you can refuse. The real ID. How is that different than the other ID? Is my other ID fake? This real ID? I have a real ID? No, this is the real one. Your other one didn't count. And that private company clear. It's like, oh I see. So you can pay to circumvent the security as long as you accept the authoritarian presumptions, right? Exactly. It's terrible. He had a semi-mentally retarded man named Richard Reed,

an Englishman who tried to put a bomb very sloppily in one of his shoes. He was trying to put the wire, because of that reason alone, we all have to take our shoes off. Yeah, which meant his attack was very successful. Because, you know, how much did that cost? How much has that cost us?

Just economically. Well, the billions of dollars they put on and the machines, what happens is there becomes the machine that comes into place and that takes advantage of certain situations like this. The machine that gave the president these new powers in the Patriot Act, the machine that now became part of the surveillance state, that doesn't want to go away because that machine is making money. So the machine at the security is going to keep going because that makes money for some

company and they're going to keep coming, we're going to need this, we're going to need this other thing, we're going to need this enhanced treatment. And then if you want to pay more. Right. And then it's replicated everywhere at once. I know Siemens, I think it was Siemens, put in these new scanners, right? They're like CAT. Yeah, they're like medical scanners. Yeah, I know. It's like you can't get a medical scan, but your luggage can.

Yeah. Yeah, for free, right? Which is also pretty strange, all things considered. Be very wary when somebody with your government says this is free. Yeah, yeah. So you have that, but as far as the Congress giving the powers to the President, neither party wants to get rid of it, because they know they'll eventually have those, they want that kind of unfettered rights to just put in their laws that they want. I think it was 125 the first week, executive orders that Biden put in.

And the Republicans don't want to get rid of it either. They don't want to get rid of the Patriot Act because they won't have the same powers. So you really have an entrenched political machine in both parties that don't want to give up these powers. So you have- Maybe the Doge guys will do something about that. Maybe they will.

We'll see. I hope so. That will be really interesting. But then you have, like, what happened with the, after 9-11 as well, this security apparatus, to, because you can do something, doesn't mean you should, because you can massively gather all Americans' communications and then try to look for certain keywords, you know, by these supercomputers. It doesn't mean you should do it. and then try to look for certain keywords, you know, by these supercomputers. It doesn't mean you should do it.

So I hope that that will be a thing of the past, but there's just so much money in it. It's the same thing. It's also very hard to get rid of something once it's there. Once it's in place. Well, you have a constituency that's agitating for it desperately, right? Because, well, they're very dependent upon it once it's in place. Well, the spy system is there, the system of surveillance, and that's an outreach of it, a very low outreach for people.

The idea that, you know, that there are these many people who want to take a plane down and crash them into a building, I would say that's very few. Yeah, like none. It's fundamentally none, right? Yeah, I think that- And certainly not at the level of detectability, because your false positive rate is like a billion to one. That's not good. That's not good.

Everybody's a potential hijacker. It's like, no, like almost no one is a potential hijacker no matter who you single out, the probability that you're wrong is overwhelming. And yeah, the question is how much damage do you do in that false pursuit of security? I mean, in London, many of the buildings, there's a bit of this in New York, but many of the buildings in London have the same sort of security that airports do. People just get more and more accustomed to it.

They do. And that is a sad, that is a sad, a sad reaction to, and in some ways, I remember when these happened, I said, and a lot of people said, well, the terrorists won. Yeah, right. Because now we've got this. That's right, exactly. I haven't heard that in a while, but it's true.

A sad thing that Andrew Doyle, our good friend, journalist and comedian was saying, that during the bombing in England, an Ariana Grande concert, that the police or security saw a man with a backpack that was suspicious, and they didn't go up to him because they were afraid it might be considered a racist. So you have another weird reaction.

So you have an overreaction to this security state system, that is a surveillance system that's put in place. And then you have an underreaction by people who think, well, this could be racist. And that ended up being somebody that they should have checked. So we're in a weird position in Western culture now, where we're under attack from all sides at the same time.

So, so let's delve into that a little bit conceptually. So one of the things that's worth pointing out with regards to the precursors for the COVID authoritarian lockdown, let's say, is what I again, what happened in the universities, because people don't understand this. And it's really important, because people generally look at the universities and they think that there's a battle raging in the universities about who should be allowed to speak freely, right? That's what cancel culture is. Yeah. That's not the battle. That radically understates the significance of the actual battle, because what is poorly understood by people, especially the moderates on the left,

is that the postmodernists dispensed with the idea of free speech itself. They don't believe that progressives should have the right to free speech and no one else should. They believe that the metaphysics of the idea of free speech is false. So for the typical postmodernist, so the enlightenment or maybe even the Judeo-Christian assumption is that, you know, you're a sovereign authority of sorts as an individual with inalienable value and one of the consequences of that

is that you have a viewpoint and that that viewpoint has intrinsic value. And I'm the same sort of being, and that means that if I listen to your viewpoint, we can come to an accord with one another that might be of mutual benefit. And so exchanging our ideas is not only beneficial, it's possible. That isn't what the postmodernists think. They think there's no game but power. And so no matter what I say, you made reference to this earlier, where you're the unwitting

oppressor. Well, that stems logically from the tenets of postmodernism, because the postmodern insistence is that the only game in town is one of power. It doesn't matter what you say you're doing, that's completely irrelevant. You are, whether you know it or not, immersed in a power game. And the power game is defined by your, what would you call it, intersectional privilege, right? It's the intersection of the various group identities that give you an unearned superiority

and power over other people. And when you're uttering your opinions, all you're doing is providing a post hoc justification for your privilege. That's it, no other game. So the challenge that the postmodernists levied against Western culture is much deeper than arguments about who should speak freely.

It's an assault on the idea of the metaphysics of freedom itself. The postmodernists believe none of that, none of it. Well, what it really is, if you scrape and look down and you go, what is that? What is postmodernism? And you look, well, that's communism. That's Marxism. This is a totalitarian state. So it's an interesting way to get to it because they went to through the educational route instead of through the traditional route of through the worker. It

was an easier turn to, and actually, it was more susceptible to get to the culture and degrade Western civilization through academia than it was through the worker because the worker knows that if he works hard, his life's going to be better in the capitalist system. Is it going to be perfect? No. Is it going to leave people out? Some people, yes. But...

Especially the people that don't work. Yeah. Yeah, those people. They'll be left out. However, in this utopian promise of the progressives is that the system is inherently evil and bad and it's your bad person participating in it. Therefore it needs to be deconstructed completely. And to get to the better utopia, which is always leading to mass murder.

So, but the academia was the place where you could have somebody like Kamala Harris's father with Stanford University having Marxist studies. And at that time in the early 70s, I think it was considered odd, but definitely inclusive. Let's include that as part of it. Not that anybody would like they thought there was genuine ideas that we should put into Western civilization. It was completely, we'd seen that it's collapsed and what it was capable of doing. And at that time, what it was doing in the Soviet Union and China,

that this is a system that we don't want, but we'll still have it as part of the academia. Well, you talked about a slight of hand that, and I still haven't been able to puzzle this out entirely because the French postmodernists were the first, the most influential thinkers who levied this challenge to the metaphysics of the West. But they did ally themselves with the Marxists, which is very strange because the first dictum

of the postmodernists is that there's no uniting metanarrative. There's no story that unites us. There's just a plethora of Hydra heads everywhere, and they're all involved in power games. But despite making that claim metaphysically, they did ally themselves with the Marxists. And I don't know if the Marxism came first and the postmodernism was a rationalization for that. It's probably something like that,

because partly what happened in the 1970s, even in France, because there's nothing more intransigent to evidence than a French intellectual, was that the failure of the Marxist system on economic grounds and humanitarian grounds became absolutely incontrovertible in the 1970s. No one could stand up and say, that's not real communism. That just became impossible, especially after Solzhenitsyn. And so what happened was the French in particular played this sleight of hand game where the axis of oppression shifted from the economic to the cultural or the racial or the sexual, right? And that's fine because you can play an oppression

game on multiple dimensions. That's what intersectionality is. And so that's how that all arose. And then I think partly the left, the liberals on the left, we talked earlier about the fact that, you know, you're a liberal who decided to be sane instead of insane. I kind of think to some degree, I've been trying to think this through most recently,

see, after the election, commentators on CNN, MSNBC and so forth, woke up to the fact that the conservatives had taken over the new media, Joe Rogan being an example. And so this is very comical to me for a variety of reasons, partly because Rogan is a very weird conservative. Also because he's-

Well, you could say more liberal leaning than anything he's- More progressive. He voted for Bernie Sanders, you know? And so like, but there's a code into that story, which is that, like I know all the main podcasters quite well, and we invited the DNC to speak to us in 2017. There were eight of us. Ben Shapiro was one, Dave Rubin, me, Rogan, invited the DNC to speak to us in 2017.

There were eight of us. Ben Shapiro was one, Dave Rubin, me, Rogan, like a whole, Brett Weinstein, a whole group of us made a formal offer to the Democrats to speak with us. No games. And we pushed that for six years. This is all documented. And they all knew it. The message went out to pretty much all the Democrat congressmen and the senators.

And I spoke to many of them behind the scenes. They wouldn't speak to me publicly. We never got one in seven years who would agree to speak to us. And now they're saying, well, you know, the conservatives put billions of dollars into this new media, which is of course, complete bloody rubbish. Rogan's enterprise is Rogan and his producer. That's the whole cabal, right? Well, if they don't make that interpretation,

then the other interpretation is very damning that all the billions of dollars, the 1.2 billion that they spent on trying to elect Kamala, that the control of Facebook, the control of the algorithm at Google, the legacy media, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, and universities, and that that wasn't enough, that the American public rejected all of that. So if they, the only other way-

Free speech triumph. Yeah, the only other way to look at it is to attack, well, it must be these well-oiled billionaire conservatives. Because it couldn't be us. Yeah, which is- We're the good guys. Well, it's so insanely preposterous, all of that. It doesn't hold up.

I mean, none of these people were capitalized, right? Every single person who became a notable podcaster, almost all of them were, many of them were comedians, which is extremely funny. Isn't that unbelievable? It is, it is. And we will return to that. But also, many of them were disenfranchised liberals, right? Rogan, Rubin, me, I would say,

Grant Weinstein, for sure. Well, he lived up there in the most liberal part of the world in Oregon. And taught at one of the most liberal schools. And I would say Elon Musk, you would put in that category too. Well, and maybe even Trump, although he's not a podcaster obviously,

neither is Musk, but the same sort of thing. You would say he was a conservative Democrat. You would have to say, he's a a podcaster, obviously, neither is Musk, but the same sort of thing. He was a conservative Democrat. You'd have to say he's a New Yorker. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now, okay, so let's return to that. Now, you said that you were a liberal who decided to stay sane.

Okay, so now you spent a lot of time in the Hollywood milieu. And so I've got two questions for you. It's like, what do you think was the difference, what do you think the difference is between you, let's say, and your decision to remain sane, and the decision that 95% of the people in Hollywood took to become insane liberals? Really, much to their own detriment.

Like my sense is, you tell me what you think about this. I think the Hollywood liberals killed celebrity culture. They did? Well, if you take a look, if you just look, that's a very good question. It's going to take some explaining. If you just take a look at the audience, and I just disregard the fact that the media has now fractured, is a fraction of what it used to be and that there's many more opportunities and more options for people. Let's just put that aside.

You used to have the Academy Awards, a hundred million Americans, when there was only 200 odd million people in America, they would all watch the Academy Awards. And happily, and everyone was thrilled to do it. And we would bet, and most of the times you were right, because there was a movie that clearly was the best film Whether it was patent or mad or whether it was you know Gandhi you would know and there was a power to it because they seemed to be the greatest filmmakers in the world the greatest most

Artistic people, you know, because Hollywood was very interesting thing. What happened was the greatest filmmakers Ended up in America because there was World War I and people, obviously filmmaking couldn't happen during war, and World War II. So you had, really the safety for creative, whether it was Billy Wilder coming over here, from Hungary, you had these, the greatest filmmakers,

their escape and the place to create was Hollywood. And so that's what happened. So what you had, so this was everything. We had it all. And then what happened was they started making these decisions, even, and you just, all you have to do is go back and look at a couple years ago, the decision. You cannot win an Academy Award unless you have 40% is go back and look at, to a couple of years ago, the decision. You cannot win an Academy Award

unless you have 40% LBGTQ, unless you have people of a certain percentage of color. The crew is this, and here's what you never hear from a 14-year-old, which is, those are the people who go see more movies than anybody else. Let's go see that new movie this week. I hear it's got 20% LBGTQ trans,

and the boom guy was Native American. So you became this identity politics and this kind of this other thing became more important than the actual craft itself. And that got into the bottom line. I mean, it really did. It affected people. Well, thank God for capitalism. Yeah, thank God for that.

Because greed is self-corrected. Seriously. It is. It's that. I mean, because greed is self-correcting. Seriously, it's a very reliable ethos, greed. Like, it is not the highest form of morality by any stretch of the imagination. But it's predictable and it's self-correcting. Right, if I know you're motivated by money, we could work together.

I mean, I could imagine there'll be circumstances under which that might not go so well for me. But most of the time, I can predict exactly would be circumstances under which that might not go so well for me, but most of the time I can predict exactly what you're going to do. We could find a place where we can agree on something that's beneficial to both of us. Yeah, right, we could agree that we both want to make money. But when you have a big corporation like Disney,

who I did movies for and I worked for years for Disney, when we have to, as parents of an eight-year-old and a 12-year-old now, we have to watch the movie first before we can allow our children to watch it, just to make sure that there's not any woke nonsense, any indoctrination geared toward our children. That is really telling. When does Snow White come out? They delayed it for two years. I know, and it's going to fail cataclysmically.

I think so too. I think people are... I've watched some of the previews. It's ugly as sin. Like the animation is... This is one of the things that's so interesting about woke illustration in particular. There is nothing uglier than woke illustrations. They're so talentless.

It must be the fact that the people without talent rely on their political credibility to advance. Maybe, and also... Because their talent alone won't do it. And it's also because they're not doing something from a creative outburst of inspiration and joy. They're doing it to prove a point or something. Well, the postmodern types don't believe in inspiration, right? They only believe in power, like seriously. And so all that inspiration stuff, that's merit, you know?

That's just another, what, offshoot of European imperialism, that whole idea, seriously. To get rid of, it's in the way, it's in the remembrance. But Hollywood was founded on not paying people. And that's why I have faith that it will come back. Hollywood was founded on avoiding paying people. For instance, when Edison had the patent, he didn't have it on the film camera,

but he had it on the projector. So Edison owned the rights to the projector, and he had these, the patent rights. So when early, he never actually foresaw the movie business. He really thought, he was actually ahead of the movie business. He saw the film camera as something for families to do and for individuals to do.

But before that happened, many, many years before that, the film business just kind of blossomed, blew up in New Jersey. And so you had these people now who are making these movies and making an incredible amount of money that they never could have imagined. You had 1,500 seat theaters, 1,500 people coming in,

and this new medium, you have to understand, there was, you had the only entertainment in New York City the turn of the century was newspapers, really. You had 18 daily newspapers in New York City. Maybe you had some vaudeville, but that was it. There was no TV, so film coming in, this new medium was just outrageous and an incredible escape for people.

And so they would go and flock to these movie theaters, fill them up, and they would try to keep them there all day. They would have an organist beforehand, and they would show several movies, and they would sell popcorn and candy, and God knows what else in there. But they also had to pay Edison his patent fee. And they didn't do that. And they didn't want to give that money. And so Edison had this thing called Edison's goons. And Edison's

goons would have to go into the movie theater and go into the place and slap them around and collect this patent money, this money that was owed to Edison. So the only reason that Hollywood was the place that the destination for the film owners and the film moguls was to get away from Edison's goons so they didn't have to pay people. So Hollywood's traditionally, the foundation of Hollywood is not paying anyone, or paying people who rightly deserve to be paid. And that's tradition they've kept up very well. Ha ha ha ha ha.

So it's strange to see the Hollywood celebrity crowd subordinate their art ethically to politics. It's fear. It's fear. It's fear. And it's interesting that the, and I'm glad that they didn't listen to them, subordinate their art ethically to politics. It's fear. It's fear. It's fear. And it's interesting that the, and I'm glad that they didn't listen to them because they weren't offering any ideas. I mean, I don't say that Oprah doesn't have things that she can relate to the average American. I mean, I'm sure she, I mean, she has Nobu, the great Japanese chef, at her house cooking sushi,

which is, I'm sure, very expensive. She has private planes and she has a $30 million house, which is probably $80 million now because of the inflation. Thank you, Democrats. She didn't have, she wasn't able to quantify or to say what Kamala stood for, what the Democrats were going to bring into place that that since they were already in power... Something new that was exactly the same thing that Biden and Harris had already been doing. So they weren't able to really get that message across.

No, you need to... And so all they could do was be fearful of what... You don't want that, you know, he's going to become a dictator even though he didn't the first time. So I think Americans just took a pass on that. But it was interesting to see Bruce Springsteen and you get interesting to see Eminem and Oprah and Robert De Niro who's just this wonderful, angry lunatic, very much coming closer to the Corleone taxi driver. Yeah, exactly, exactly. He's really re-imagining that. Well, the other thing, too, is that fundamentally, and I've probably been sinful in this regard, to some degree,

you actually don't want to know what celebrities think politically. First of all, it's no more interesting than what anyone else thinks politically. Yes. And they're also in their bubble. I mean, Oprah doesn't leave her bubble, so she naturally thinks the people she hangs out with

are better, but she doesn't know what it's like. And that's what I try to explain. You know, when Jimmy Kimmel was crying, I said, dear Jimmy, I said in my Twitter post with 10 million people looked at, which was a lot larger than his audience, I said, it's me, Wheezy, the guy who you said several years ago because he was unvaccinated

shouldn't be treated at the hospital, but should be left in the hospital corridor to die because he's not vaccinated, it's me. And I went on to say that you can't relate to what 26% inflation is. Jimmy Kimmel and these other celebrities like Oprah, if prices go up, they don't have to choose between what the average American would have to do, between getting gas or groceries, maybe not both this week. And so what are we going to do? And I said

to Jimmy Kimmel and Oprah, if avocados went up to $5,000 in avocado, you would just have $5,000 guacamole. It doesn't affect you. But it really does affect Americans. And I think that it wasn't a tough choice for most people. Most people knew they were being lied to. Most people knew that at this point, and thankfully the alternate media, which apparently according to the Democrats, is billions of dollars and much more powerful, these individual podcasts like Theo Vaughan and Joe Rogan. That is where they're at. Theo Vaughan, corporate mogul.

You know, it's so insane. It's so insane. Not the Google algorithm, which is 98% of the searches in the world that's suppressing conservative viewpoints. None of that matters. Right. It's Joe Rogan. And it's so interesting, too, that all of this was successful None of that matters. It's Joe Rogan. And it's so interesting too,

that all of this was successful despite all that suppression. It wasn't just that the Democrats controlled the legacy media, let's say, and the major tech companies and the universities, they were actually using those entities to squelch, I would say classic liberal and conservative voices, and it didn't work. It didn't work. So how do they

How do they recalibrate because it was easy to get angry when Trump lost the when when Trump won the first time in 2016 and for everybody to be election deniers at that point and go He is I remember a politician saying he is not my president. It is he's an illegitimate president and Really undermining the transition of power at that time, which they completely forgot about four years later. So where do they come now? Where can they go? And the only way that they can go is to—they're going to have to come to Jesus. They're going to have to come to the point where, yes, they do not represent—they do not understand what the

average American goes through, what they understand the experience of the average American, how are they going to recalibrate, how are they going to get power again? They're going to have to come back to the Bill Clinton middle of the road, we're pro death penalty, it all depends on what the definition of the word is, you know, whatever, we're going to have to, we're these super predators, and that's what's going to happen because it seems like they're going to lose, not just this election, they're going to have to, we're these super predators. And that's what's going to happen, because it seems like they're going to lose, not just this election, they're going to lose two Vances. And if you take a look at American history, you look at some of the trends that seem to

repeat itself. The last time we had three basic one-term presidents, if you look at, well, Nixon didn't intend it to be, but he didn't finish that term. And then you had Ford, and then you had Carter. So those are three that didn't finish their terms, or at least one term presidents. So now you have three in a row again. You had Trump, Biden, and then Trump's not going to be running again. So there's a chance for that, this Republican push. If they do it right, and if they represent

the American people, more than just realign themselves again with the corporate power. And that is the question for the Republicans. Will you continue to be what is happening right now? 70% of American wealth is owned by the Democrats. We have 30%, we have now the Republican Party, and I say we, because I've joined the Republican Party, we are now the party of the people. How are you going to govern? How are you going to improve these people's lives? And I believe

we have good people in place, and I have faith that we will be able to deliver on what is demanded from the American people. So we reiterated, a group of us again reiterated our invitation to sane Democrats, or any Democrats for that matter, to come and talk. Now, I have a question for you about that because I spent quite a lot of time, well, part of it was this invitation back in 2016 to the Democrats to talk. That never went anywhere, although as I said, I met many of them behind the scenes.

That was always interesting. I always asked the Democrats I met, many senators and congressmen, when the left goes too far, and none of them would answer that. There was no cutoff. And, you know, people on the progressive side, even the liberal side, aren't very good with borders and boundaries because they like the free flow of information and there's some positive things about that. But it makes it very difficult for them to defend themselves

against ideological infiltrators. And you know, the first time I interviewed RFK, I asked him when the left goes too far, and he said he didn't want to run that sort of divisive campaign. And the second time I interviewed him, all he did was talk about when the left goes too far. Well, he did, because he is someone who is a, who was a recipient of the illiberal liberals. Yeah, that's for sure.

And what you have is... Him and Dean Phillips. Here's what's going to have to... Yes, here's what's going to have to happen for the Democrats. When they are confronted with their mistakes, when they have been confronted with evidence of their misdoings, they're going to have to suck it up and admit it. Yeah. So the American people are very forgiving people.

We have a political system that's unfortunately is two parties, which is one more than China. Yeah. We're not China. China's got one party. You're told in America we get two. So can we at least have two normal parties? But when the Democrats were confronted

with actual evidence, thank God, pray for Elon Musk's safety. Thank God for Elon Musk that the Twitter files came out. When the Twitter files came out, with the wonderful, you know, I mean, Elon Musk, you have to say, is the leader for free speech in the world, defending free speech in the world. There's no question of it. And when he gave them free reign, Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, to look at the Twitter files and you come to your own conclusions of it, to look at the Twitter files and you come to your own conclusions of it. And when they testified in Congress and they said that yes, that the Biden administration

within day one was communicating backdoor channels to Facebook, and Zuckerberg has admitted this and apologized for it. At day one, that the Biden administration was colluding, the real collusion was with tech companies to silence Americans who didn't go along with government narrative. And Bobby Kennedy was a recipient of that in the first 36 hours. When they were confronted with that,

instead of saying, we're gonna recalibrate, we are going to step back, we're gonna take, we're gonna accept this and we're going to move forward because that is not tenable for this party. Instead of doing that, what does the Democratic Party do? They attack the journalists. Yeah. They attack the journalists, their integrity,

and then try to undermine, which they couldn't do because the evidence was so blatant. So what did it end up doing? It ended up showing them that they weren't gonna change no matter what. They were gonna leave kicking and screaming. They were gonna be the party, not to equate them to Nazis, but they were going to be the party that asks for Paris to be blown up at the end of the war.

Why? Not because it's going to help them win the war, not because it's going to do anything to advance their cause or their beliefs or anything, because they could destroy as much as they can before they leave. And that's why Hitler, and that's why the general, I forget his name, but the general refused to do that. Because civilization, Western civilization must continue. We must go on.

So I have a moral quandary about this invitation to the Democrats to talk. Well, because there's two positions you could take, right? One is find the reasonable people and help them make their case, both within the party and to the public. And that would be predicated on the idea that it would be better to have a healthy two-party system, right? Where both parties were reasonable and moderate and sane and they were functioning effectively as opposed forces.

In good faith. In good faith, yes. But there's another viewpoint, which is tyrants have to burn before they learn, right? And like I've seen in 10 years of talking with Democrats, I've seen very little evidence whatsoever that, like all the Democrats I talked to, they didn't believe the radical left existed. For example, I don't think I talked to a single moderate Democrat who believed that there was a difference between equity and equality of opportunity. All the modern, every single one of them, I swear this is true, they

said, I said, well equity means equality of outcome, which is what Kamala Harris said it meant, which is what all the postmodernists. How do we get there together? Yeah, and that but they're there their response uniformly to a to a man and woman was they don't mean that they just mean equality of opportunity Well, and that's what's his name that crazy billionaire who insists upon being a Democrat Tom Jeff Bezos, I mean no no no no no no no no Be, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, thought, yeah, wow is right. It's like, I don't know where you've been for the last 20 years, Mark, but this is not what's being taught in the universities. And then we have that problem too. It's like, are the Democrats going to sort themselves out? Well, there's a lot of their policy that they have to abandon. All this DEI nonsense has to go. Affirmative action probably has to go because it was the root of all the DEI nonsense, or at least one of them. I whole oppressor-oppressed narrative has to vanish. There has to be a radical turn back to something like appreciation for the free market. The Democrats are going to have to turn themselves back into classic liberals.

Luckily, they have... There's a sledgehammer that's going to help them. It's called the Trump administration. Because the Trump... When I talked to Don Jr., one of the things we, John, the president's son, one of the things we talked about was like, you know, President Trump did not surround himself with the best people last time. Yeah. And he said, yeah, we know that.

Yeah. And also I said, I forget if he said it or I said it, there's not going to be the pressure this time because he's not going to seek re-election in 82, when he's at 82 years old. He's going to be a one-termer. So what does that mean? That means he's not going to have the pressure. He's not going to have that, what is the purpose of his administration?

He's going to want to get things accomplished for the American people. He is going to want to cement some sort of legacy for himself. He has the opportunity, which I could not have imagined him even said two years ago, a year ago, the most consequential politician in American history outside Abraham Lincoln. That is an outrageous- With the most consequential potential team. Yes. Well, he does have people in place now that are going to potentially change the medical

industrial complex the most that it's been since 1966. The last time there's been an upheaval in the medical, you know, in the CDC and in the medical establishment was in the mid-60s. This has a chance to turn that on its head. And we must. I mean, one of the underpinnings, not just for free speech, but also for me, and I want to get back to talking

about the other why I think a lot of people in Hollywood were silenced. Yes, yes, definitely. I do want to get to that. But one of the things for me personally was the fact that over 54% and this is a 2012 statistic from the National Institutes of Health. I have a very good friend over there, Dr. David Klonoff. He's a great man, professor of medicine at University of San Francisco. Fifty-four percent of Americans, children, now suffer from chronic illnesses that are unheard of a few short decades ago.

Now, the fact that that is not the number one story in the newspaper and is not dealt with every day or at least weekly. I mean the fact that that is just ignored and brushed under the rug is that that is not a problem. That to me was untenable. I could not live with myself unless I was moving towards doing something about that. And if that cost me everything, I was willing to pay that price

because this is something that can no longer, because I have young children. I mean it's like, and my children something that can no longer, because I have young children. I mean, it's like, and my children, I try to do the best I can with them. I don't let them, I don't agree with the CDC's recommendations. I don't go along with that. And I do believe that with my research,

which is the great Jimmy Dore, he said like, they didn't want us to, don't do your own research during the pandemic. Research, you mean reading? You don't want us to read? To learn, to come up with our own ideas? And so from my reading, from my experience of talking to other parents,

there is a real problem with our children that we have to get a handle on. And the fact that that was squelched and the fact that the Democratic Party who was in charge and the Republicans too, they take as much from Big Pharma, that we got to get a handle on that, or nothing else matters. When we have 80% of Americans, and why Bobby Kennedy, I supported him,

that's why I knew his campaign was in trouble early, because I was his most famous celebrity endorser. Yeah, that's definitely not a good thing. I know, I said, Bobby, you got a problem. I'm gonna kill, we can do this together. But the fact that we have, most of Americans are unhealthy or we're poisoned in America. We have to get that Otherwise nothing matters. It doesn't matter if Democrats or Republicans doesn't matter if the Democrats get back in because we won't be have money to pay For roads we're not going to be able to pay for infrastructure for the schools whether the schools are woke or not

We won't have money for it. The system is crumbling or woke or not, we won't have money for it. The system is crumbling. 17.5% of our GDP is now spent on health. We spent five times more than Europe per person on our health in America. And we're not getting good results. If this doesn't change, nothing else matters. So this is a critical time for America,

and we have the right people in there. And Trump, to his great credit, because also, I mean, Robert Kennedy, as you know, he's a great man and he would have worked with the Democrats. They shunned him. When he called Kamala Harris, he called the campaign, they wouldn't even return his phone.

When he called Trump, he was on the phone with Trump that day. So you really have somebody who, for whatever reason, God put Donald Trump as his person. Because God has a sense of humor. Seriously, man. God has no problem working with people who are flawed. God has no problem with prostitutes.

God will have no... It's like this person... All the Old Testament prophets were deeply flawed. Yeah, deeply flawed. Every single one of them. And corrupted in some way morally. Yeah. But this is the person that...

It is a wonderful situation we find ourselves in, and it literally is... I love that the Democrats are just befuddled, and they're confused, and they don't know what to do, because the line of attack didn't work. The new line of attack, they don't know what they can do, because the other attack didn't work, the new line of attack, they don't know what they can do because the other one didn't work. So what are they going to do? But in the meantime, we have an opportunity for the first time in my lifetime

to actually look at the chronic disease of children, the chronic disease of people, and to try to heal it. So do you think it's useful to return to a question that I asked you previously? Is it a better strategy to let the Democrats stew in their own juices for four years and reorganize their party? Or is it a better strategy to find sane voices on the moderate Democrat side and highlight them?

Yes, absolutely. You think that's a better strategy? We have to. I mean, it's a little bit further than where I'm at, but it is an outreach of where I'm at. What we have to do is, I was out in D.C. talking to Senator Ron Johnson. I was talking to some other congressmen from Oklahoma, and they're putting legislation in place to, or they're putting legislation, they're preparing legislation to get rid of

this crazy lawfare, this has to stop. So in other words, if you're a Senator, you're a Congressman, you're nationally elected or former, whether you're President Biden who's about to leave office or Vice President, if you are, if there's a lawsuit at the state level, it's automatically bumped up, the legislation is to bump it

up to the federal level. bump it up to the federal level. So it takes it out of any potential... Jurisdiction. Yeah, that is extremely politicized at the state level, as we saw with President Trump in New York City. So that's important. So that's legislation that has to happen.

And that's what I told Don Jr. I tell all the Republicans, the Republicans have to wear the big boy pants. We have to stop the lawfare. We have to, I mean Biden has, I mean when Trump gets in, he's going to have to pardon Biden's son. Let's just move on. That's a terrible thing to have to do. But I can certainly, seriously.

It needs to happen. Yeah, well, I think you can make a strong choice for that. We have to move on. If we're going to do stuff for the American people, let's just let us really move forward. Right, so petty revenge is off the table. It is. What about those 50 people who signed, the 50 former intelligence service workers who signed the document?

51. 51, yeah, who said that. Former intelligence officials or current security state officials who all said that this has all the earmarks of Russian propaganda, the laptop, and they all lied. Yeah, they certainly did. And about something very terrible and they probably threw the election. Yeah, I would say they definitely, it was such a close election. That's for sure and it was so well timed.

So what do you do with them? I think you have to have a, the way you could hurt them isn't to prosecute them. The way you hurt them is you hurt their ego by taking away what they love. You take away their classification for secrecy. What is it called? You get the clearance. Yeah, security clearance.

Security clearance. If you take away their security clearance so they don't have access to this information anymore, because even the people who are out of, they get to keep that. These people, Formers, they get to, that is like their badge, they can go and look up stuff. So if you take that away, that'll be a spanking,

because I'm not as concerned about those people anymore. I'm concerned about the people that are now. We have to, we need to send a message to the people in power now, whether it's the people at the CIA and the FBI, that this shit has to stop. And that if you do this, you will, you will have to suffer some consequence. Now, that isn't to say that some of the stuff won't come out with the people who lied during the pandemic and who withheld information and who censored Americans. Some of that may come out, but I would much prefer a South African system of truth and reconciliation, or truth, and if you tell the truth,

we won't convict you, there will be no trial, there'll be no charges filed against you, but you must tell the truth. Because for Fauci to lie in front of Congress, and for the Justice Department to not care one way or the other about it. Just to completely ignore this. For the Justice Department, to me the biggest sin of the Justice Department was when there

were people that is against federal law to protest in front of a Supreme Court Justice's house because obviously that is harassment from people who set the tone for our society. These are the final arbiters who say what is legal and how are we gonna live our society. It is these nine individuals. They must be protected. That is why it is a lifetime appointment to avoid any potential political motivation on them.

So to allow that, to allow these people to protest at the homes and for the Justice Department to just ignore that particular federal law. That was absolutely the worst thing that Merrick Garland did during his time. Yeah, well, it does seem reasonable to do as little tit for tat revenge as possible. It's a weird thing, eh, because you don't want to avoid the responsibility of bringing people to justice, but it is definitely a sideshow. And the problem with persecuting your political enemies is that you will be their political enemies in no time flat.

In one day. Yeah, well, it's a degenerate, that's a banana republic game, clearly. It is, but now who will rise out of that? Who will be the Democrat that comes out of it? Yeah. I mean, you have, we'll see. So you think they should be talked to? Absolutely.

The water's reasonable Democrats. And you'll have people, you'll have people show up. They'll be very low level. Well, they're already lining up. Well, okay, there'll be very low, lower level Democrats showing up. And I think you have to put out to pasture the Democratic leadership. And I think that will. The self-correction will have to happen.

Because if they want anything, it's power. And if they want power back, they're going to have to recalibrate, they're going to have to, I don't think they're capable of doing any soul searching because I don't think that they have that in them. I think once you become so politicized in this, it's more of a survival mechanism of drowning than it is trying to. Well, but I think what you said will happen though. Like you see this, there's an old joke in the scientific field

about the fact that new ideas don't win, it's just the people who held the old ideas that are no longer valid die. Yeah, I agree with that. Right, right. Well, and this is basically what you're pointing out is that there is a cadre of leadership, so to speak, on the Democrat side that will just be rendered irrelevant and new people who we can't even predict will rise and hopefully some of them will have a vision. There's an opportunity right now for young,

competent Democrats assuming that well, the problem is that everyone with any courage has had their voice silenced in that party. So the question is, is there anybody with courage left? Right? So, well, so let's return to the holy one issue. I will say to this though, the Democrats that will step up,

it is the best time for Democrats because they will stand up for the average American now that they have no power to actually do anything for the average American. And that is the strength of the Democratic Party when they have no power. They stand up for the individual when they have no individual, when they can do nothing for the individual. Yeah, well maybe that's partly how a two-party democracy actually works, you know, is that

the people who are out of power then turn to the people. Well, it could be, right? I mean, it could be, yeah. It could easily be that the huge advantage to the system as it's set up is that power flips continually. It does flip. It doesn't matter so much who's in power, it matters that power flips. Traditionally, yes.

However, there has been a Marxist strain in this particular Democratic party that has been, if you dig underneath of what this equality was, this equity was, and as Thomas Sowell says, if you can't have the same outcomes in the same family, how are we going to do that in greater society? Of course. Yeah. We're going to make that person. That's for sure.

And we're going to do it because you're automatically racist in a system of systemic racism. Therefore, you can't be in that position of power. We have to put this person here who doesn't even know that he's been oppressed against. So what it really was, and what Thomas Sowell talks about, was that it's really this form of elitist, and that's what the democratic strain has to get out, this form of elitism. Yeah. Because what it really was, it was eugenics back a hundred years ago. These people are

automatically inferior because of the color of their skin. We're more, and we're superior to them. And what it was is a strange group of progressives 110 years later saying the same thing again with different language. These people of color are automatically oppressed and you're automatically the oppressor. But it's the same, it seems to be- Well, that has to do with that proclivity to think in terms of group identity. Yes. Yeah.

Well, you know, in many European countries and also in Canada, the way we solve the problem of the socialists of the liberal side was to have a socialist party. So in Canada, we have the New Democratic Party. Now, Trudeau has turned Canadian liberals into people who are farther left than the socialists. And so that's a complete bloody catastrophe. It is, but it's always painted

as if we're doing wonderful things. Yeah, well, the bloom has gone off that rose in Canada. It has. He's going to disappear in relatively short order. He did us a favor though, because when he crushed the truckers and when he called them terrorists, and when he, these are people who care deeply

About their country and wanted to peacefully protest and the truckers who drove all the way across the country got the attention of the world And when he crushed them when he called them terrorists when he he froze their bank and biggest and race and biggest and real Yeah, you have to do the whole try and I think white supremacists. Yeah, I saw There's a flag. I know there's a flag. Do you know how many people in Canada fly the Confederate flag? It's like zero. Zero people. Yeah, but that's one right there. That's enough. The whole group is represented by one guy who works for us who carried the flag.

But that actually helped wake up Americans to realize that, you know, to the tyranny that we could stand up and it really was. It was the Canadians that showed the example. Yeah, well it had big interests in Europe too. It did, well let's stand up against this. So in a sense when they were crushed, they really did liberate us at their great expense. And that's what has to happen for freedom to expand when it's contracted. There needs to be individual sacrifice.

Okay, so let's turn back to Hollywood. Now you don't seem to have been counseled very effectively. No. Well why not? Well. How come? What did, first of all why did you? Now, you don't seem to have been counseled very effectively. I know. Well, why not? Well... How come? What did you... First of all, why did you...

My wife would disagree with that. Well, you're... When you turn away millions of dollars, it is a tempting thing to just go along with status quo. I'm not going to say I'm not corruptible, but I would say that when they did... Just weren't offered enough. Yeah. My price wasn't met. Yet.

Yet. I'm more than willing. But I mean you're thriving, I think. I mean I'm not saying at all that any of this was without a cost. So why don't you walk us through that a little bit. Well I met these parents in 2012, 2013, who told me that these kids were absolutely fine and that their children, under two, were above the markers where they need to be.

And then they were giving these load of vaccines all at one time and then all of a sudden they developed neurological disorders. And they used the word autism, but what it really is is brain damage. There seems to be, and I know it was discredited under Andrew Wakefield, but now more and more research, we've been able to say that there is a cytokosmic reaction from in the gut bacteria that is directly related, that could affect the brain and cause brain inflammation. And so, when I always thought the Chinese talked about the brain, the two brains, you have your brain here and brain there, I always thought that metaphorically.

But no, it's an actuality. You have your brain and your gut. And so some children are genetically susceptible to having a problem. And we have a system that's a, it's everybody, there's just a, it's a system where everyone has to be included in it. There is no exceptions. It's a everybody in, and there's never been a drug, whether it's any drug ever, that's 100% safe, 100% of the time, for 100% of the people. And so these were people.

Except Ivermectin. Except Ivermectin, that's a pretty damn good one. It is. The most used, the most, the Nobel Prize winning medicine, horse paste, as it was called. But this, so you had these parents who said, my child is fine and then he wasn't fine. And I believed them, and I still believe them.

And so what happened was, if you try to go against that, the big pharma, they'll crush you. And they will take away, and so I did, I testified, I learned as much as I could, spoke to these parents and then testified on their behalf in the state legislature in California. And- When was that?

2014. And boom, they was descended upon. Oh, so that was early. So that was- Right, right. So that's where I, and I met Bobby a few years, I mean, I remet Bobby. I knew him in New York. But then we became this stunned by the fact that these, there were these, a tremendous amount of children. I mean, this is, it is consequential. It isn't, this isn't a minor

statistic when you could say that one out of every 36, this is a statistic from the NIH and the CDC, one out of every 36 children, and as much as one out of every 26 boys, now has a neurological disorder that is called autism. That is untenable. We can no longer continue as, I mean, I can't continue with my day knowing that information and just pretending and going to make Deuce Bigelow 4 or whatever. At a certain point, you have to go, why aren't we dealing with this? And then you realize the machinations at play and you realize the tentacles of Big Pharma. Forget about the Mexican cartel.

That's a measly five, 10 billion, maybe on a good year, $20 billion a year. Forget about them. The drug cartel for that drug alone, $350 billion a year just for that, those series of drugs. And they never go evergreen. In other words, it doesn't become generic. They keep making this money every year. And so in 1986, there was this Childhood Vaccine Safety Act where Congress ruled that vaccines were unavoidably unsafe. So the vaccine makers were getting sued the hell out of them, and they got tired of it. So they went to the Reagan administration.

They said, hey, you've got to help us out. Well, if you don't make this, if you don't take away our liability, if you don't protect us from lawsuits, give us liability protection, we're out. And so Reagan didn't want to sign it, but he got talked into doing it. One of my dear friends, Barbara Lowe Fisher, she was one of the parents, one of the few parents who was on the, that was working with Congress

at that time on that legislation. And once that legislation went through, which for the first time, it gave us the vaccine adverse effects reporting system, which at least is something. At least it can say anybody can report to this and then there's a government marker of something, whether it is 100% factual or not. The fact of the matter is it is indicative of something.

And so there at least was a system. But instead of following through what the Congress was mandated to do under that legislation, which was checked for the safety of vaccines, they've never done it. They've never done it. They have never done it. So still to this day, there's never been whether it's a vaccine for measles or whether it's for any of the vaccines have been tested with the gold standard, which is the thousand people, thousand kids with the shot, a thousand without, and let's check the results. That's never happened.

So why is that and why can't we have that? Because they don't want to know. Because they have a cash cow happening. And that cash cow is never going to end unless somebody gets in the way of it. But what's in the way of it? What's in the wake of this? We have generations of injured children. We have generations of people that have been hurt.

How did you meet Kennedy? Well, Kennedy was involved in this. He was as left, a lefty. Remember when the Democrats were environmentalists, but for real? Remember when they cared about animals and whales? Before they cared about offshore wind machines that were killing whales by the dozens? Well, they cared about the environment. They cared about spaces for animals.

They cared about nature. They cared about pollution. Well, this was the environment that I was, I mean, who doesn't want to join and be part of a cleaner environment for your children, for yourself? And so he was cleaning up the river in New York. And so as their need to do, they need to raise money to fight these lawsuits, and so they just need

dumb celebrities like me to show up and shake a few hands and show up at a party. I see. I see. Tell some jokes. Yeah. And then you realize the work that was required to clean up the Hudson. The Hudson was a place that like, you know, literally was so polluted that fish couldn't, fish could not breed in it. You couldn't swim in it at your own peril. So something had to be done.

And it really, it took, it wasn't industry correcting itself. It was a group of people that were, that fought that system. And he was one of the lawyers who sued every polluter on that Hudson and eventually got to the place where that water now is pristine, well, is as close to pristine as you can imagine. And there's fish again and you can swim in it. So that's a huge success story. So he automatically had my respect. And so when he got involved, a little bit later than I did,

with the idea of vaccine-injured children and that there was a problem. So you already regarded him as credible at that point because of the other work he had done. Yes, and we needed somebody of his stature and of his brains, frankly, and his legal powers to come into our organization and see what we could do. And when I say organization, it's this mom here, it's this mom here, it's a group of it.

And what do they have as opposed to the pharmaceutical industries? You can say what is their motive? To continue getting hundreds of billions of dollars. What is the motives for the parents of injured children to prevent this injury from happening to other parents to prevent this misery? Because their kids already has damage that may be, you know, irremediable. And so these are people that I want to stand with these people. And it isn't easy. And it wasn't without a cost.

But the cost... So that was your first foray into the political, and that was essentially, that was in 2014? And then I realized the parental rights, because what they do with rights, and I remember for whatever reason, I mean, because my dad was Jewish, and he would always have these,

when the Nazis come back, because they're going to come back in another form, they're these, you know, when the Nazis come back, because they're going to come back in another form, they're going to come back. And when they come back, they're not going to take us alive. We're going to, there's a gun and you grab that gun, you're going to go here and you're going to, and he would have it.

And I always thought that was crazy. But then it piqued my interest because any Jew who was born in the 1930s, the indelible mark of the Holocaust was something that you always had with you. My dad, it never left him. Of course, how could it? You know, this is a slaughter of relatives and blah, blah, blah.

And so, I went to East Germany in 1984 and I said, let me go to the Reichstag building. And at the Reichstag building there, which was in West Germany in the middle of Eastern Germany, at the Reichstag building at that time they had all the laws that were enacted from Nazi Germany from 1934 until 1940 when the Nazis no longer felt the necessity to even pass laws or any legislation because all the rights for the Germans had already been taken. But it was incrementally done, just like, you know, taking your shoes off at the airport, whatever. But it was incrementally done enough to the point

where eventually, you know, all the rights were gone. So that really stuck with me. So there was legislation in California that was brought on by this state senator, Pan, which was to force parents, because there were still legal rights. So in other words, if you had a child that was injured from a vaccine, because maybe genetically predisposed for an injury or it happened, and the kid became autistic, you have another kid, you don't want to risk his potential, so you should get a medical exemption. So

what they wanted to do, or you can get a philosophical exemption or a religious exemption to these mandated drugs, or your kid can't go to school. So what happens, what they wanted to do was make it more difficult for parents. So they proposed this legislation with saying, you can have that exemption, but you have to go see a doctor, and the doctor has to agree to give it to you. So they put a wall up to make it difficult. And the average parent is gonna go, well, I gotta go to work, I gotta drive,

and I gotta do, you know, what's the, you know, how, you know, and then pediatricians, if you weren't up to date on all the shots for every child, all about, they would kick you out of your pediatric practice, which was cruel. So under the seeing this, and then that legislation did pass, and there was a lot of the parents,

and I was up there with the parents, and they were upset because they knew that this was just gonna be eventually taking away, and they did, the next thing they did, the medical board and the legislation, which was written by Big Pharma, was to take away the rights from the parents, so they couldn't even have a medical exemption, and they did, the next thing they did, the medical board and the legislation, which was written by Big Pharma, was to take away the rights from the parents so they couldn't even have a medical exemption,

and they did in California. There is no medical exemption in California if you want your kid to attend school and if his sibling had a problem with these vaccinations. So that is medical tyranny. And so at that point, I was ready for seeing how far this was going to happen. So if they could do that in the state of California,

America's largest state, most populous state, then they could literally shut down the world and make you have vaccine passports. And they did. The idea was we are gonna keep track of all this and you're gonna have to take it, otherwise you're not gonna be able to travel. You're free, you're free to stay in your home,

you're free to- Well you know that the extermination policies in Nazi Germany started out with the medical community. Yes, there was a vermin. We need to protect you from this vermin. Yes, definitely. So it's always under the auspices of protection and safety, and usually health. Yeah, right.

And the Nazis very much use that health. Yes, and doctors were radically overrepresented in the Nazi party. As a matter of fact, a very interesting statistic is that the number of PhDs, the highest percentage of PhDs in any society in the 20th century, Nazi Germany. So intelligence and degrees and elitism doesn't protect the society. Well, yeah, well, the problem is if you're smart and you're also celebrated for being smart you have this terrible temptation to worship your own intelligence. Right?

That's literally the Luciferian spirit, right? The most, the, what is it, the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom who goes most spectacularly wrong is Lucifer, right? He's the bringer of light and he's the avatar of the intellect raised to the status of object of worship. And it's absolutely the case that smart people are prone to that temptation. I kind of think that's how God balances the cosmic scales, right? Is that it's really a massive advantage to be biologically blessed with high intelligence. And it's a biological phenomenon.

But the temptation. That's the thing, is that it comes along, it comes, what it has along with it is the worst of all possible temptations and curses. Well, you have the new aristocracy, the new aristocracy, the new, instead of lords and dukes and princes and kings, it's PhDs. It's the expert in this. Yeah, well that's- It's the CIA expert, it's the expert in this. Yeah, well that's... It's the CIA expert.

It's the expert in the State Department. These are now that... That's ground on to some Rocky Shoals in recent years. Well, this is another thing that I'm really curious about with regards to the renewal on the Democrat side, let's say. Yes. Because I can't, for the life of me, see how the university... I can see how the Democrats can turn themselves around because there's a lot of turnover in politics.

But there isn't at the university. Quite the contrary. They're set up so that there is no turnover. And, you know, there was reason for that. But in the big universities, all of the faculty are Democrat, and a huge proportion of them are quite radically left. And it's even worse among the administration. So, like, how in the world is that possibly going to be fixed? I've thought about that. Well, what's going to have to happen is, just like capitalism and just the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace of finances and money and the

results that these, you know, graduates of these clearly- Addled. Addled universities will have is going to work its way out. It's going to have to. Very much like in the late 60s and early 70s, and you remember this, there were, especially in California, there were these universities where you can get a degree just going out

and sitting in the woods. So if you have a degree from 1972 from like UCLA or from Santa Cruz, University of Santa Cruz, I mean, people, you know, you would look at the resume and go, okay, well, this isn't a real degree. This person, you know, is not gonna be able to help our car, help us design cars. So the solution to the universities will be capitalism.

It will have to be. It'll have to be also, I mean, somebody's- They'll also fail economically because they're too expensive. They will, and then what will have to be. It will have to be also. I mean somebody's... They'll also fail economically because they're too expensive. They will. And then what will have to happen is that these universities are going to... I mean, I say this on stage to an audience. How much would you have to hate your child to send them to Yale right now? To send them to undergrad? Because you know, the business schools are still 85%. Harvard Business School is still 85% conservative. The business schools, these are people

who have to actually make a living. They have to actually prove their worth in finance, in an actual business sense. But the undergrads, they can, and the teachers there, they can just continue to crank out advocates for a particularly, for an illiberal etiology that is completely partisan. That's gonna continue until that weeds its way out.

I don't see that happening except for people are gonna have to like, if you wanna be a millionaire, Charlie Kirk was talking about that, work in the trades, become, I mean, God knows we are short of plumbers. You know, if you can be, if you want to be a welder. Especially entrepreneurial plumbers. Absolutely. If you can have a series of,

if you can have your own business of plumbing, you could become a millionaire in short order. So working with your hands, so, and you have these degrees that I would have. Also harder to replace with computers. Right. You know, when you have a, that's the way I try to explain to people, my liberal friends, the few who still talk to me, you want a plumber to come in and fix, if you have, you know, literally human waste coming out of your toilet, spilling everywhere, you want a plumber and you want somebody to, you're not going to invite that guy after to stay

for dinner. You're going to say, just do the work, please, and just please make my house livable again, or this part of the house livable again. I say the same thing about Donald Trump. He's not gonna come to your kids bar mitzvah He's not gonna stay for Thanksgiving dinner He's gonna be in charge of having enough people to take care of that problem that you have and that's a cancer society We don't have to like him, but you should stay out of his way stay out of his way And and like there is a purpose in it and the majority of Americans seem to think that is a better road.

So let these people, the good people of America, have made a decision. Now let them follow through on it. And that's the particularly tough road that the Democrats have to hoe. Because they thought, well, even if we lose this election, we'll get the popular vote. But they didn't. So they have literally no air. So their balloon can't fly. There's no hot air that they can put in that's workable.

The hate is not going to be, there's not enough hate in our society now. There seems to be a sense of relief. Yes. So that balloon of hate and disparaging Donald Trump is not taking off. So that is where we, that's where we're at. That's a very good place to stop and also well timed. And I think what we'll do, by the way, for everybody who's watching and listening, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side, I think we'll spend half an hour there talking about Rob's experiences specifically in Hollywood and what he sees on the horizon for comedy and also for entertainment in general. So if you're inclined, join us on the Daily Wire side.

This is Rob's new book in case you missed it at the beginning. You can do it, which is a good message and also a necessary one because even though you have this remarkable cadre of people in charge on the Republican side under Trump, they're going to need help at every possible level. And, you know, your whole culture here in the United States is predicated on the idea that not only can you do it, but you should. And if you don't, then all hell will break loose.

So yeah. Thank you. So very good talking to you. Thank you very much. And thanks again, everybody, for watching and listening. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]