Shownotes Transcript
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We have special guest Matt Walsh is with us. He's a political activist, author, podcaster, columnist. He is the host of the Matt Walsh Show podcast and writes his column for the conservative website The Daily Wire. He has authored four books and starred in The Daily Wire documentary films What is a Woman? And most recently, Am I Racist?, which I saw a special screening of. It's scheduled for release on September 13th.
Please welcome to the show Matt Walsh. Hey, Matt, how are you? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Fantastic. Now, before we get to the new movie, what is a woman? Did you ever figure that out? Well, I don't want to give spoilers away, but we did figure it out at the very end of the film. We discovered it's... Apparently, it's an adult human female. Who would have thought? I don't even know what is a female. That's the next movie, I think. What is a female? We just keep going deeper and deeper. It's the franchise. Keep going. Now, how much...
Do people try to... Now, you've been considered a transphobe and all that stuff for doing that. And have you found that your message connects people from the populist left and the populist right? Have you seen a cross-section of people coming together? Yeah, we have. I mean, that was the interesting thing with the last film, with What is a Woman, that even though I might be a crazy right-winger, you don't have to be
radically right wing. You don't have to be conservative at all to affirm the basic reality of human biology. In fact, up until very recently, that was not a political issue remotely. So it's like, and I think even on this next film, Am I Racist? We're dealing with race and
Uh, but it's a, it's a similar sort of situation where you don't, you don't actually have to be conservative to enjoy the movie or even to agree with the basic ideas that are, are presented, you know, sort of the message behind the film is one that I think is, uh, is, uh, again, not all that long ago, it wouldn't have been considered even a political message. Well, I just think it's interesting that, you know, my friend, uh, Keaton makes the point, or maybe Russ, uh, says that, uh,
you'd be the kind of guy who'd be writing on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. I was conditioned to think, conservatives don't have a sense of humor, right? They're not funny. And watching that movie, it was really hilarious. And the way you can straight face stuff
is, you know, it's a real, you're really nailing that technique. And it was a real, plus it was to me, I describe it as, you know, it was if you feel like Borat or those movies, but except this has a point and it actually sticks his chin out. You know, it's not just silly, funny. It's funny with a real point and a purpose, but it's not like smothering you with it either. Let me play the trailer and we'll talk more about it.
Let's be clear what's happening in this country. It's Nazism. Republicans are Nazis. You cannot separate yourselves from the bad white people. Growing up in the 90s, I never thought much about race. Sure, you noticed, but it never really seemed to matter that much. At least not to me. Being a white, straight, cisgender man is the top of the pile. I'm on the top of the pile. That's me. Am I racist? I would really appreciate it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. Can you please leave?
I'm going to sort this out. I need to go deeper undercover. If I want to be an ally, I need to look like one. What is racism? Martin Luther King said not to judge people by their... Martin Luther King said a lot of stuff. Is America inherently racist? What the hell is that? The word inherent is challenging there. America is racist to its bones. All of the... So inherent. Yeah. The entire system has to burn. And I'm not going to even use save this country. This country is not worth saving. This country is a piece of shit.
Oh, sorry. Sorry. Joining us now is Matt, certified DEI expert. Here's my certification. Where are you guys in your anti-racist journeys? So I'll look around the room and point to who we believe is the most racist person in the room. We want to rename the George Washington Monument to the George Floyd Monument. Would you mind signing it? You will?
What do you think about this issue of heteronormativity and how it intersects with the broader structures of racism in society? What's up with white people? What are you doing to de-center your whiteness? Who's making it a center? Why are they doing that? What you're doing is you're stretching...
Out of your whiteness. Listen more for you in this field. White. Folks. White. Trash. White supremacy. White woman. White boy. White. Entitlement. White. Centering. White. Silence. Is there a black person around here? There's a black person right here. Does he not exist? Hi, Robin. Hi. And what's your name? I'm Matt. Matt. Hi, Matt. Nice to meet you. I just had to ask who you are because you have to be careful. Never be too careful. They gonna say you racist.
So that's the trailer for the movie. And the thing that I liked maybe the most about the movie, besides the humor, it was funny all the way through. So many funny parts. But...
You highlighted in a perfect way that the people who are actually carrying on Martin Luther King's message of being colorblind and judging someone by the content of their character is not the Ivy League educated, but it's actually the people where the rubber meets the road, right? You went into a biker bar.
And you'd expect them all to be these. They're like they weren't. They were the opposite of racists. They were. Why do you keep they kept saying to you, why do you keep making that the focus of everything? Why do you focus on? And that's what I find is with the liberal elite, the professional managerial class. So there they put everything through the prism of race these days. And and that was I just want to say that was a was a great way to expose that.
And in fact, in parts of the movie, there are just regular people saying that you were racist as that character. Right. Right. And so go ahead. Take it where you want. Yeah, well, I think you're exactly right. And what you find is that normal everyday people, if they especially if they kind of exist outside of this DEI bubble, you know, they haven't been exposed to racism.
corporate HR brainwashing sessions, if they're outside of that, then, you know, especially in modern America, your kind of default position is, you know, you notice when people are of when someone's of a different race, but it doesn't, it's not a big deal. You don't focus on it that much. You're not sitting around worrying, oh my gosh, am I racist? Am I being right? You know, you're not thinking about that. And I think that's the default position of most normal people, which is what we find as you point out in the go to the biker bar, even though, you know,
Going to biker bars, a bunch of white guys, Confederate flags hanging on the walls and everything. And yeah, if you listen to corporate media, you would expect if you listen to them to walk in and hear nothing but just like vicious racism. Not what you hear at all. In fact, we immediately go from there to the black community in a very poor part of New Orleans and ask all the same kinds of questions. We get almost like verbatim answers. In fact, in both places, I heard this, you know, we all bleed the same color. You know, that was kind of like their reflex line.
Which is basically the Martin Luther King idea of, you know, judge someone by the content of their character. And then you compare that to... We saw in the trailer, talking to one of these anti-racist so-called experts, and I brought up to her, well, didn't Martin Luther King said, judge him by the content of your character? And she said, well, Martin Luther King said a lot of stuff. And then she went on to talk about basically why he's wrong. So... Which is interesting. What that tells us is, like, you've got these kind of grifter types. And they are...
They, I think, notice that the default position for most people is to not care that much about this stuff. That worries them because if you don't care, then that's less money and power and influence for them. So their whole job is to get you to care about this and to get you to focus on it.
and to make race an issue when otherwise it wouldn't be. That's the whole scam. - So now, I just want to get your opinion where all this comes from because everybody thought, in fact polls showed this and research showed this, that people thought that racism in America was declining and we were in a better place than we ever were. We elected Barack Obama overwhelmingly twice, a black guy with a Muslim name twice,
And then all of a sudden people have also noticed this, that then the mainstream news media started highlighting racism, white supremacy over and over and over. And that was right after Occupy Wall Street. And so the theory is that
They saw the because the Tea Party was upset about the Wall Street. And then they had the lefties on Occupy Wall Street. They were upset about Wall Street and what the government was bailing them out. And they had come together on this idea. And so the establishment had to figure out a way to divide people again. And they did it through planting all these stories of racism and using racism and white supremacy again.
And so it didn't really come from the ground up. This isn't something, you know, just like the trans issue. I think that came from BlackRock and that came from the top down to divide us. And the same thing. Would you agree that that's where this comes from or do you have a different idea? Yeah, I think that's an interesting theory. I basically agree. I certainly don't. I certainly agree. It didn't come from the ground up. This is a top down, top down.
you know, top down, uh, uh, situation here, it kind of filters down from these institutions, government, media, academia filters down into the general population. I do think that, yeah, kind of ironically, Barack Obama's election probably is, uh, one of the main reasons why we're experiencing a lot of the racial strife we're experiencing right now, because now I was not an Obama voter, but, uh,
You would think that the greatest evidence that there is no systemic racism in America anymore is when you elect a black man. If a black man can make it all the way to the very top of the system, voted there by the people, then that's really good evidence you would think that systemic racism is not an issue anymore.
Which, of course, it is evidence of that. But then I think you had people on the left who said who were worried about that and said, well, OK, that's going to take this off the table now as a means of control and manipulation. And we can't have that. So they had to double down on the racism stories. And it wasn't long after, you know, I think it was.
BLM came along as a movement in, I think, like 2013 or so. It wasn't long after Obama's election, certainly after his reelection. And I think that's what it was. They couldn't allow America to say, okay, well, we still have a lot of issues, but systemic racism really isn't, you know, it's not an issue anymore. We could cross that off the list and focus on other stuff. But I think a lot of these people didn't want that to happen. They couldn't allow it to happen. So they've had to go looking for racism everywhere.
And they're looking for it in increasingly desperate ways and finding it more and more in places where it obviously doesn't exist. I mean, I'm not naive. I know racist people, right? I mean, I've come from the south side of Chicago. But I don't think it's anywhere near the problem that they want to make. Just like the rest of the country, I think that that problem has been receding and that people...
It's not the problem they make it out to be. But there is, you really reveal this in the movie, that there is this cottage industry of everybody getting their DEI certified cars so now I can go out and teach DEI. And I was surprised to see that. I didn't realize what a money-making...
it is to, uh, hyper focus on racism and people's race and inject it everywhere. Uh, that, that was, was that surprising to you to find that out how much money there was in this? Yeah, a little bit. And, and one thing we do in the film, you'll see when you watch it that we, we, uh, we even put up on the screen, the amount of money we paid these people to appear in the film. That was amazing. And in some cases it's going to be a lot more than you would have expected. Way more. Uh,
Yeah, and it's an interesting thing that we don't hide from the fact that we paid them to be in it. Now, they didn't, like, it's not scripted. They didn't, it's all real. But we said that we want to talk about race and, you know, and you would think that they care so deeply about this issue, they'd be happy to talk about it and they wouldn't need to be paid for it. But they do need to be paid, which kind of shows that there is all that money in it. Why is there money in it? Well, I think it's like,
In a way, it's similar to why there's a lot of money in medicine, in that people will pay a lot to be cured. Yeah. Now, with medicine, hopefully it's like a real cure, a real treatment, although not always. But with the DEI grifters, they're selling a fake cure for a disease they basically invented. They tell people, well, you're racist. You're inherently racist. And here's what you could do to treat that illness, right?
And they can charge kind of the sky's the limit. They can charge any amount of money because they got people who are scared and like, well, I don't want to be racist. Cure me. But then, of course, the sad irony is that after they give you the cure and you've already paid the money, then they tell you that, oh, by the way, you're still racist because you're still white and you're never going to not be racist. I asked Robin DiAngelo this in the film, and she says that, you know, in any given moment, you can be more racist or less racist as a white person, but you can never be not racist. That's not an option, which, of course,
For a lot, I know for myself, I hear that and I think, well, no, I can be not racist. Like, I'm not racist. I actually am not. I don't being racist means that you, you know, hate people of other races or you think they're inferior. That's what racism is. And if you don't have those feelings in your heart about other races, then congratulations, you're not racist. You might still be a very flawed person. We all are. But you're not racist. Like, you don't have to worry about that anymore. But again, they they can't allow you to say that because then that makes them irrelevant to.
And they can't tolerate that, certainly. Let me show this next clip. This is... I'm so interested. So you went to... What do they call this that you went to? This is a session. It's kind of a support group for white people who are struggling with their white grief. And I think what they're grieving is their...
their whiteness and the fact that they have privilege and kind of just grieving the, you know, cause you're white, you're, you're a bad person. And, uh, that's what they're grieving. So they all, they all sit around in a circle, very like AA style. And there's this woman who's there to talk them through it. And I was able to attend one of these sessions and did my best to,
take part and you know go on the journey with these people not not yeah it is a lot of white guilt especially the scene right before this the white guy says you know i'm an asshole he calls himself an asshole it makes me laugh it made me laugh so hard uh but how did you get i was wondering as i was watching the film how did you get your cameras in there how did they allow you to come film
Yeah, they all... That's one question people have. It's like, well, is this secret? Is this a hidden camera? It's not a hidden camera. They all know that there's cameras in the room. They all signed waivers agreeing to be filmed. And, you know, that's it. Now, why are they happy that this is what the film ended up being? Probably not. And why would they still appear? Like, why didn't they ask more questions? Why weren't they more skeptical? I don't know. Part of it is, at least for the people that we paid, like...
We gave them the money and they had a dollar signs in their eyes and they, maybe they threw caution to the wind and they're probably regretting it now, but it is what it is. Okay. So let's play this and we'll talk about it. White participants in the group feel that there's something in themselves that they have to overcome when all that's being requested of you is that you be. Hello. Hi. How are you? Sorry about that. Oh, no problem. You good? Yeah. Yeah. Remind me of your name again.
Uh, uh, Steven. Steven? Yeah? Okay. Um, did you want to come up? Come up? Yeah, do you want to come up and share anything? Sure, what do you want me to share? Whatever's on your mind. I just want to know that, like, my physical safety and yours and everybody else's here is okay. Why would your physical safety not be okay? Did I miss something? I don't feel comfortable. What? Can you guys catch me up to speed on what's going on here? You don't need to be caught up. We're going to be silent.
Is it because I said I had 17 black friends? It might have been 15. It depends on how you count them. I would really appreciate it if you left so that the people who actually want to be here and deserve to be here can get what they need. I do want to be here. Can you please leave? I would like it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. Come with me. Well, I didn't consent to be touched. I'm not offering to touch you. I'm offering to walk you out. Will you walk with me and I'll answer your questions. Okay. I'll admit it. I'll admit it.
My name's not Steven. Maybe you already knew that. My name is Matt Walsh. I just was here on this journey that I'm just starting, but...
I see that I'm not wanted. If you were on your journey, then you would have told us who you were and your real name, but you didn't. Are you saying I needed a better disguise? Is that what you're... I don't know. Maybe. But you can figure that out as you walk out the door. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Thank you so much. I really had a transformative experience myself. And my pronouns are he, him... Okay.
I did everything I could to fit in. I opened up. I was raw and emotional. I told them about my black friends. It was no use. They rejected me. And they called the police. My mere presence in the room caused them pain. I'll never be accepted if I look like this. If they know that I'm Matt Walsh, I'll always be an outsider.
I need to go deeper undercover. A whole new identity. If I want to be an ally, I need to look like one. Like someone who is progressive, tolerant, enlightened. Let me think. Have I ever met anyone like that? Ah, yes. Yes, I have. What is a woman? Why do you ask that question?
Am I racist? Rated PG search. So, um, I'm still, I can't get over, um,
The guilt all those people have in that meeting. It was really... It's comical. Yeah, it is. I mean, especially watching it back in the room, it doesn't feel as comical. It feels quite sad, actually. Because that was... And what you see in the clip there is the end of... What ended up being the end of the workshop. Yeah. But there's a whole scene before that where I'm there and I'm interacting. And in real time, it was actually like an hour and a half that we were there. And yeah, I mean...
You go around the circle and all these people are telling their stories and revealing just this guilt and grief that they carry around with them all the time. I think mockery of these ideas is appropriate. Obviously, that's what we're doing here. And it's an effective tool, I think.
But it is also just sad that these all, because what I want, you know, if we weren't making a movie, what I would want to turn to those people and say is like, guys, you're okay. You don't need to be here doing this. You're fine. You're not, none of you are racist in this room. You wouldn't be like, you're all fine. You're okay. Just go live your life and don't worry about this anymore. Um,
And, you know, if I had said that to them, it would have been like the end of the movie way too quick. But yeah, but, but that's the, you know, that, that's the truth. Well, there was the, I don't know if it was at the dinner party or maybe it was in this meeting. There was a white woman. She said she was married to a black man and, uh,
She said he talked too loud sometimes. And so when she's asked him to not talk so loud, she felt like she was being racist. Yeah. Yeah, I think that was Race to Dinner. And that was... That was it. And that was another one where they...
You know, they go around the table and we have some of this in the film, you know, you can't, most of it obviously doesn't make it in because it's a 90 minute film. But another thing where they go around the table and they ask people, uh, in this case is all women at the race to dinner. What give us examples of racism in your own life. And they all are ready. You know, they're on the ball with examples of being racist, uh,
And I'm listening to it. I'm like, none of these, none of that is racism. Again, you guys are all fine. Well, you're not fine. You obviously have issues. Otherwise you wouldn't be here. But your issue is not that you're racist, but it's just for some, for some people, this kind of emotional and psychological manipulation is very, very potent. And I hope that this movie can be a part of kind of deprogramming some of that to some extent.
Did you ever see that interview that Morgan Freeman did with Mike Wallace? Yeah. And he said, he says, I don't want a black history month. Do you have a Jewish history month? Do you want a white history month? Do you want, and he said, then Mike Wallace says, well, how are we going to fight racism? And he said, stop talking about it. You know, I'll, I'll stop calling you a white man. You stop calling me a black. We'll just call each other human beings. I think I'm paraphrasing, but with Ed,
That's kind of like the message you found when you went to the where the rubber meets the road. You interviewed black people, just regular, not a professional managerial class. Remember, you asked them, you know, how do we get over racism? And he said, you know, just love each other. And you could it be really that easy? Yeah. Yeah, that was that was Milton, the
mechanic down in New Orleans. We went down to New Orleans. It was a great... Just a very nice kind of soul. And it was interesting talking to him. Again, this is probably a 30-minute conversation. Only a little bit can make it in the film. But he's just...
so outside of most of the stuff I'm throwing at him about DEI and systemic racism and all, it's just, it's not even, it's not a part of his world at all. He's not thinking about any of that ever. Um, which, which is a success story. Cause this is all, as we discovered in the film, he's, he's a, he's a, an immigrant. He moved here. Um,
So we should consider a success story. He came here. He's got a job. He's a contributing member of the community. He doesn't feel like he experiences racism. He's not focused on it. He's just living his life. We should be able to call that like an American success story. And it is, except that these grifter types, they look at that and they see it as a problem to fix. Like they want to take that guy. They want to take Milton and say, no, no, no, hold on. Stop being so happy and well-adjusted. You should have problems. I'll tell you what they are. And that's what they want to do.
So what do you say about the people who bring up, which is an argument I often make, that the criminal justice system is systemically racist because, well, the crime bill put people in prison. So black communities did crack, white communities did cocaine. You got much higher sentences for crack. And now they are much overrepresented in the prison population than their population numbers. And...
What do you say to that? What's your argument back there? Yeah, I would say I don't... We could talk historically about... Obviously, everyone acknowledges that in the course of American history, black people have been discriminated against and there has been racism, obviously, in society. You can go all the way back to slavery existed as an institution in this country. It existed in an institution across the whole world too, by the way, but it did happen in this country. Yeah.
Right now, though, I certainly do not think that there's systemic racism, systemic anti-black racism anywhere. It's not something because systemic means it's in it's embedded in the law. It's in policy. It means that like there are laws and policies that specifically target and disadvantage you if you are black.
And that doesn't exist, which is why no one can give a specific example. Like, give me the policy that says if you're black, this bad thing's going to happen to you. Now, you can find it in the reverse. There are groups that are targeted. This is what affirmative action was for so long, where we are going to exclude and disadvantage you based on your race. But that was not targeting black people. That was white and then Asian. There's nothing like that happening in the reverse. And even in the criminal justice system, I think that, you know, yes, there are people
As you say, black people are overrepresented in prisons, but especially in urban communities in the cities, the violent crime rate is what it is. And especially young black males commit a disproportionate amount of particularly violent crime, which is probably why you find more of them in prison. I wish that wasn't the case, but it just simply is. We all know it. And then we kind of look at the prison system
at the incarceration rate and we're told that we're supposed to see, well, this is totally out of balance. Well, it's only out of balance if all of the races are committing these crimes at an equal clip. So you have to prove that first and then you'd have a case that the incarceration rate is the result of systemic racism. But what we see from all of the available crime statistics
is that that's not the case. That all the races don't commit crimes at equal rates. And so you'd expect to find that reflected in the incarceration rates too.
So, yeah, just one pushback on that a little about, you know, so after they passed the Civil Rights Act and everybody was supposed to be equal, you know, then they then Nixon started his war on drugs, which targeted overpoliced black neighborhoods. The CIA is bringing crack into their name. And so they would break up families that way. They'd over incarcerate, you know, they would take the black people.
a male out of the house put him in prison because of these drug um so i think if we got rid of the drug war was i think really much more injurious to the you know black and brown community and um uh
That would be my one point that I would push back. That was intentional. And then there's the for-profit prison system. And then you have someone like Kamala Harris, who's black, who kept people in prison so they could be used for their slave labor and stuff like that. So even when a black person's in charge of it... Go ahead. Yeah, well, one thing I'd say to that, though, is that I think...
One of the major problems now in communities of all races, but in the black community in particular, is more of an undercarceration problem where you've got violent criminals. You have these woke DAs who are letting violent criminals
out or letting or not arresting them letting them out arresting them again letting them out get second third fourth fifth sixth uh sixth strike um and what does that end up happening it's like well those violent criminals end up they they don't you know they usually stay in those communities and target the innocent members of those communities um and you know that so like to me that's
If you want to talk about the criminal justice system, that's our major problem right now is that we're, you got, you have violent, dangerous people who are being allowed to terrorize communities basically at will. And then the woke, the woke DA is essentially, I guess their, their strategy is, well, we're going to let you keep committing crimes until you do something so heinous that even we have no choice, but to put you in prison for at least a little bit of time. Um,
But when they do that heinous thing, like someone's going to be the victim of that. Someone's going to some old lady walking down the street is going to be the one who gets randomly stabbed to death by the by the hobo, you know.
And it's a really, it's an awful thing. Do you think that, I see those stories too. I feel the same outrage you do over stuff like that when they're letting non-violent, I mean violent people out. Is it because the prisons are filled? Because we have, we're the largest penal colony in America, in the world, the United States. We incarcerate more people. We have 5% of the world's population. 25% of the incarcerated people are in the United States in prison.
So do you think it's because we incarcerated so many nonviolent drug offenders that we don't have any place to put them? I mean, why do we have so many people? Yeah, I don't know that it's a matter of room because if you listen to the woke DAs when they're justifying this stuff,
And they might say a little bit about the over-incarceration, there's no room, but that's not their main reason. Their main reason is that they will give themselves is, well, this is about restorative justice and all these buzzwords. So for them, no matter how much room's in the prison, what they're saying is,
you know, we, we, we just, we just don't believe in like doctrinally, they don't believe in justice. They don't believe in making the bad guys pay for their crimes. Um, especially if they're part of a, you know, an improved victim group demographic wise. And so that, that's the reason they, they just, they, they think that it's, um, oppressive, I guess, to, you know, hold somebody accountable for things that we all agree are like,
terrible crimes that should be punished. So now you're a self-described conservative, and I consider myself a liberal, but not modern-day liberal. They're not...
they've turned them so i'm you know for freedom of speech not i'm against censorship i'm for bodily autonomy right um i'm always been anti-war i'm for ending the wars investing that money back here i'm for you know getting uh uh cleaning up the corruption inside a regulatory corp corporate capture of iraq all that stuff that bobby kennedy was saying at that trump rally right um
And he got a stadium full of Republican voters to cheer for all that stuff, stuff that I, but I'm, you know, I'm, I go one step further. I'm also for Medicare for all right. Uh, no. Well, how many of those things would you and I disagree on? Um, I think on the basic principles you just outlined, I think we, we would line up pretty well. I mean, we don't, you know, we talk about bodily autonomy, for example, it depends on, is that going into abortion? I don't believe in abortion. Um,
But if you mean... Force medical procedures. Right. We shouldn't force people to take vaccines. I'm with you on that. Free speech, totally with you on that. And so I think there's a lot of alignment. And I do think between someone like you and me, there's probably, almost certainly, a lot more alignment between us than there would be if instead of me sitting here, it was, you know, Saira Rao, like one of the people from our film. If one of them was sitting here, I think you'd probably have less, I imagine, less in common with them.
And on free speech in particular, for me, people act like it's a complicated issue. I don't think it's all that complicated. I'm a simple man. Maybe I tend to simplify things. But I kind of think you have the right to share your opinion, period. And if it's an awful opinion, we can tell you that.
Which is not the same thing. Do you have the right to say literally anything you want all the time? No, of course not. You don't have the right to threaten to kill someone. You don't have the right to defame someone and that sort of thing. But that's not an opinion. If you're expressing your opinion, your point of view, people should be free to do that and let it all out in the open. If someone has a repugnant opinion about something, we can expose that. So to me, it should be pretty simple. Okay. All right. Well,
You got to go. I appreciate you coming in. I love the movie. I thought it was, you know, I thought you were sticking your chin out and doing it in a comedic way that often, you know, I'm a comedian, and so comedy often can help illuminate an issue better than anything, and I think it really does in this movie. So thanks for coming in. Nice to meet you, buddy. Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay.
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A stand-up comic and veteran of Saturday Night Live, he has gone on to a successful career in feature films, including starring roles in the comedy films Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo, The Hot Chick, Grown Ups. His latest comedy special, Woke Up in America, is available on Fox Nation. And he also had the number one movie in all of Latin America, most recently on Netflix. Please welcome to the show, Rob Schneider. Hey, Rob, how are you?
Thank you, man. How's everything going? Good. Tell me, tell people about that. Your movie going number one. Well, that was a shock because, uh, I don't know, for some reason, Jimmy Netflix didn't want the movie in North America. So I put it on South America. They were happy to have it. And then it went number one in every country that it's been, that it went into and they still haven't put it on in the United States. I don't know. Conservatives. Um, I don't know. I think it has something to do with that.
Well, I wouldn't call you a conservative. I would call you. I know I'm a traditional liberal for crying out loud, just like you. I'm reading your new book and you talk about that with your new book. When is your new book come out?
September 24th. Okay. That's a pain in the ass to write a book, by the way. Jimmy. Yeah. I wrote one once. I know. Yeah. It took months and then you have to research stuff and then lawyers look at it. Lawyers. Yeah. Uh-huh. It's 6,000 revisions. 6,000. Well, counting each word.
I'll never forget the lawyer was like, well, how do you know that Joe Scarborough is an alcoholic? I go, no, this is a joke. Well, jokes are tougher now. You know, I got people paying to see me and they're still yelling out crap. Well, here I want to show this. It says this is making the rounds on Twitter. I wanted to show people this. You got you got heckled. Someone wanted you to shut up.
recently after people at a venue. What venue was this? Do you know? Yeah, that was in Sarasota, Florida, which I thought was pretty safe. That's like the Switzerland of comedy. Yeah, you would think. Yeah.
So someone yells at you to shut up and here's, you handle it very well. Let's play it. First of all, nice suit. I like that suit. Thank you. Here we go. You think okay? Are you mad? You okay? No, no. He's not mad. You're mad? That's okay. You know what the cool thing about it in America is? Free speech isn't the speech you like. Nice stuff's not what needs to be protected. It's the stuff that you hate that needs protection so that somebody like the government or you doesn't get to decide what everybody else gets to hear. Woo!
And you're more than welcome to disagree and write an act and get on stage and sell out like I just did.
That's that's such a great comeback. Hey, if you disagree with what I'm saying, write an act and come up here and rebut me. I know. But it is funny, though, that people feel as if that's some form of debate, yelling, yelling at someone and shouting them down. And I think there's been a bad example that's happened recently.
Something happened. I think some people's brains broke, you know, like in the NFL where now if somebody gets a dinger before nobody cared back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. But now if you get a dinger, they take you into the blue tent. So I think for some liberals, they have to go into the blue tent and just check and then come out again. It is in Florida of all places.
Yeah, you would think I thought that was the Switzerland of for comedy where it was, you know, certainly was for COVID or even the Democratic politicians would go there like AOC would go there. You know, without masks and stuff. And then, you know, I just stupidly not thinking that people were going to take pictures of her and put it on the Internet.
And people paid like that's not you just wandering into a club like in Hollywood you wander into the laugh factory or flappers or the improv. That's not you just wandering into a club. That's that's people paid on purpose to come hear what you had to say. And that person there also paid. And.
And they want to, that's, that's so wild to me. And I give a warning now before the shows, you know, I give like, you know, if you are trapped in your political echo chamber, if hearing ideas separate than your own may cause your emotional collapse, which most of it was written by John Cleese of Monty Python, the great, you know, comedy icon. He wrote it for me because I told him this was happening. And it did remind me of like Sam Kennison in the early, one of the mid eighties where I saw people paying to see him,
to get up and walk out as if making a statement. And I remember like, wow, that was odd. But I do think that it is some form of strange comedic protest that I don't know if other art forms people get this upset, just a series of words strung together. And I do think it doesn't bode well for society and for debate and for the idea of intellectual exchange of ideas.
To say the least, yeah, I agree. And it also fucks up the show. I remember I was on stage in Portland. This is probably like 2018. And...
You know, because I was a Democrat my whole life and the Democrats cheated Bernie, I felt like they personally cheated me, too. And so my my ire was never really since 2016 has always been for the Democratic Party because they lied to me. They cheated me and they asked me for my vote and then shame me when I wouldn't give it to them. The Republicans didn't ever ask anything for me. I never voted for them. So I had much more interest in making fun of Democrats than.
And I was doing a show at the Alberta Rose Theater. And obviously this was someone who had been brought there or given tickets by the owner of the venue. Right. So they always have their own set of tickets that they keep, that they give to people. And this guy just started screaming at me. Why are you making fun of the Democrats? You should be making fun of the fascists and making fun of them. And I'm like, dude, did this you don't get to first of all, you don't get to do this.
If you don't like what I'm saying, you could get, there's no glue on your ass. Get the fuck out of here. And exactly. And if you got something that you want to say, write an act. Come on up, write an act. Yeah.
But anyway, I don't- There used to be this sense that happened, and I think you saw the turnover of it. And I would say comedians are more keenly aware of it than I would say because of the potential conflict and being able to perform and the immediate response. It used to be when you disagreed with somebody, there would be some tacit admittance that there can be a contrary opinion. And now it's just-
has devolved into if you disagree you are a horrible person yeah now a judgment on you and you are some sort of um cultural purgatory that's that's what i'm i'm sensing from that and and also the sense that these anyone who thinks they're 100 right and that their side is infallible
That is a deep structural problem and shows that they're being indoctrinated and not open to at least having some of their foundational thinking questioned. And I mean, that's what my whole book's about. It's just, you know, let's discuss your foundational thinking and let's keep it open to, you know, what really, I mean, how lucky we were to grow up in the 70s.
I mean, that was the best that Jimmy Carter's administration was so such under siege that it created, you know, this freedom of ideas and everybody wanted to be silly after the Vietnam War. Yeah. It is being a bitch in time to be alive and being a teenager, you know. So not today. You know, Democrats used to say things like I'm tolerant of everything. They used to preach tolerance and they would say I'm tolerant of everything except intolerance.
Yeah. Which now, now they've, it's the exact flip. Now they're intolerant of everything. Well, it also, what has also flipped is that there is, um,
There is a structure now where the Democrats have been in control so long. And now, like any authoritarian or any power that has extended past its peak, it becomes authoritarian and it becomes abusive and corrupted. And if you just take, you know, well, it's Justin Trudeau, who I would beg to say would be always corrupt in his administration. But I would say that it needs to
have its leaves shaken. And what I think needs to happen is we need to have, we're only allowed to have two parties, you know, that's it. That's what the global elites will allow. But we need to have a functional Democratic Party. I mean, you know, just the fact that we're even considering that the Republican Party could somehow be the voice of the people now shows how far the Democratic Party has strayed.
So how do we return the Democratic Party to a more normal party that isn't just a power grab, sensorial attacking, using the Justice Department to go after their political opponents? How can we do that? And the only way to do that is to kick them out of power. But I just, I mean, they're so entrenched now. I mean, who knows how many, you know, van loads of ballots will show up at three o'clock in the morning. But I think they have to get trounced so that you, you know, for three successive, at least the executive elections,
And I'm not saying that the Republicans are the only answer. They have great answers for it. They need to get trounced, the blue monster, like three times in a row at the executive so that they'll have to regroup and be like what the Clinton, what Bill Clinton was. Remember pro-death penalty Bill Clinton? Bill Clinton. Yeah.
And the death penalty and pro death penalty, anti worker, anti welfare, pro cop, deregulated Wall Street, deregulated the media corporate. He was he was a right wingers wet dream. I mean, that's it was that he was the successor to all the to everything that the Democrats would have opposed in the 1970s. Yes. Well, like.
So what happened was Reagan scared the hell so much out of the Democrats, they became them. They were like, well, if you can't beat him, join him. And so when he became president, he actually got stuff done for the corporations that...
George Herbert Walker Bush couldn't get done. NAFTA was a big one, right? Because the blue dog Democrats wouldn't go along with George Bush on NAFTA. And then Bill Clinton became president. He gave them cover to do it. So now that's we got NAFTA and cut the legs out from underneath the unions for a generation. Right. It did. And I don't think people truly understand what NAFTA is and what it does. NAFTA was a globalist.
Yes.
for its own rules. So when there was a company that was polluting into the Rio Grande, which was poisoning people in Mexico, the Mexican government sued, took it to the court and lost because NAFTA had superseded. And so the people there didn't matter. And the poisoned people there were allowed, the company was still allowed to continue to poison people there. And so that's what happens with this globalist agenda. There are always these big plans,
But it really was what it was, was a further erode erosion of human rights and and and the welfare of workers, the welfare of people in those areas. And it degraded the human condition. And I think that's something that is not the specifics of these policies need to be really examined so that people could look at it and how it affects human beings, because ultimately the human condition and you and I would agree on this.
is the most important thing in the world, is increasing and bettering the human condition, not worsening it. And these are the things that worsen it. And Bill Clinton went on to then explode the prison population with the crime bill written by Joe Biden at the same time. So he exposed the prison population at the same time he gutted welfare.
And then he was going to get rid of Social Security and privatize it, which I know from Thomas Frank in his book Listen Liberal. And what stopped it was the scandal over the BJ he got. So thank God for Monica Lewinsky and that BJ because it saved Social Security. But he did get to deregulate Wall Street, repeal the –
What is that? I'm blanking on the name of the act he repealed. And then it crashed Wall Street and the economy within a decade.
Well, we have – what started with Reagan was the deregulation so that the banks didn't have – banks were happy to get 3% profit on their money. Right, yes. And the fact that they were able to open the floodgates and you no longer had to hold any percentage of monies and that if you had to hold 10%, which I believe was the regulation back under the Carter administration, once that was – floodgates were opened and they could put –
as much money as they wanted i think was down to three percent that they had their holdings and then they could really um invest and do whatever they wanted then the it was just a matter of time before that abuse exploded the system and so we're just waiting again for the next implosion and i believe that next implosion is not that far away i think the next monetary implosion uh
I would say within the next 48 months, we're going to see a complete, utter meltdown. And that will be – the reaction to that will be more authoritarianism. Yes. Authoritarianism. And we're going to see – I mean, my friend was talking about this –
Dr. David, I'm blanking on his name now. But we have a really interesting talk. And it really is the only chapter that was not allowed to put in my book. Really? Yeah. Dr. David Martin. That's it. Oh, I had him on my show. That guy's a mind blower. He's a mind blower. And he talks about the, he believes that there's going to be a
The meltdown will be a zapping of the financial system, as you saw a mini-zap a couple of weeks ago where things got shut down. I think it's that, according to David, these are just test runs for the big zapping of the financial system where they have to go down to zero. And how will society – and we can see society starting to fray. And when you –
go, it's five days. That's the estimate before people start when you cut off food, grocery stores, when all society breaks down. I mean, is this something that I don't want to happen? Is it something that's a possibility? I would say the more that we continue to print money on endlessly, the more that we are putting ourselves in, in a position where the government's going to do something crazy. And he's saying that they're going to zap the financial system
and blame China, Iran, Russia, as they're the ones who did it. And then you kind of start from zero and that $35 trillion just goes away, as does all your money and everything in the bank. So that's a pretty extreme, crazy thing. But he's a doctor. I'm not. I'm just relaying. And anyway, I wasn't allowed to put that one in the book. Well, so I'm putting a lot of my money in gold and Bitcoin. Yeah.
Get some groceries, get a farm. I mean, like three things for survival if this shit does hit the fan. The three things that makes civilization possible.
Three, nutrition, clean water, clean food, socialization, have a group of people going somewhere, getting enough food, whatever. And then sanitation, make sure that the guy coming that's cleaning out whatever, your septic tank or whatever, make sure he still stays in business. Those are the three things that are, you know, when the if and when the shit hits the fan. So it's just what this is, is
is uh food for thought people um you know it's not like these i remember laughing at these you know the people who were like these uh hiding and building bunkers but when you have mark zuckerberg building a bunker painting his roof blue i go wait a minute he must know something he must know something i want to show you uh this before i let you go because this is right in your wheelhouse uh
I don't know if you've seen this clip from Morning Joe, but here is Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough, who used to be a Republican.
And I was one of those, I hate Donald Trump, so I love Democrats. And they're going to talk about how nice it is that the progressives just fell in line, that they didn't ask for anything for their vote. They didn't demand anything. They didn't demand any changes, any corruption. Not that they demanded an end to a war, an end to funding. Nothing. They didn't ask for nothing. And he's going to say how fantastic this is. 2020 was a stretch.
When the Democratic Party in the primary had gone far left and she was trying to fit into that box and people say, well, why does she look so awkward? You're talking about Elizabeth Warren. At times then, but not now. It's because she was trying to follow where the party was. This actually is a more comfortable fit. You know, Simone, we talked to Elizabeth Warren earlier talking about how progressives throughout the Biden administration.
have been patient. They've been pragmatic. They haven't done what right-wingers in Trump's party has done. First of all, I just love that he pretends that Elizabeth Warren has her finger on the pulse of progressivism. She's a progressive the same way your local police chief gets hip-hop culture because he came up with the don't do drugs rap for a kid's assembly. Okay, here, let's keep going.
to make Americans go, what's wrong with those people? And it reminds me of like the Logan Roy line in Succession, which was the line of the season, probably the best television line of the year. You're not serious people.
people and when you look at the republicans and what they're doing you sit there you go you just look at donald trump's tweets you're not serious people you look at those democrats but you know who is serious the people who want to escalate the war in ukraine
Those people are serious. You know who else is serious? The people who want to make sure your food supply stays poisoned. Those people are serious. You know who's serious? The Democrats who repeat whatever Big Pharma says and the corrupted FDA. Those people are serious. The people who do unscientific things like masking, lockdowns, experimental medical treatments mandated or you lose your job. Those people are serious about that stuff. Those people are serious.
Not the people who push back against that stuff. They're unserious. If you were serious, this is another version of if you were a grown-up. If you were a grown-up, just grow up. Grow up and get on board with the military-industrial complex. Grow up and get on board with the corruption inside the Democratic Party. Grow up. You can't have everything you want. You can't even have anything you want, it turns out. I'll play a little bit more of this. Last night, a ton of progressives in that hall
ton of progressives saying we're in it to win it. That's a serious party. That's a party that has their eyes on the prize and they're not going to let ideology get in the way.
So he's saying, you know, you're serious when you don't demand anything of your party anymore. You're serious when your ideology means nothing to why you are a member of a political party. That's when you know you're serious.
When you sell out every value and principle you have, that's how you know you're serious because you support the 100% warmongering anti-worker corrupted by corporate money party, Democratic Party. That's when you know when you're serious.
If you stand up for health care or if you want to end a war, if you want a living wage for people, if you want to get the corruption out of our regulatory or captured regulatory agencies, or if you want to stand up to big pharma, you're not serious. That's what Joe, Mr. By the way, the guy who told you if you think Joe Biden is mentally defective, then F you. Remember that? Remember when he said that? But I'll throw it to you. What do you say to that?
You know, I'm of a couple of minds on this. When you watch things like Morning Joe and that whole punditocracy and their opinions, they have boiled down politics to celebrity culture.
And horse race. I think that's a big part of why actors get into this shit as much as they do. I don't know that that was always the case. I don't know if before they made politics so much like Hollywood news coverage.
I don't know if actors really were into it the way they are now. I think that way of covering it speaks to the way that they think. It's all all this stuff. It's the Chris Matthews shit. It's it's all horse race. It's all Washington gossip. It's all who met up with who in the cloakroom and who made this deal. It's their audience has been trained and conditioned and their audience is largely the base of the Democratic Party.
They've been trained to think of politics in the shallowest possible terms. They think of politics the way you would think of who's going to win the Oscars. They don't really connect a policy agenda to it. Now, the other part of it, which I think you're intimating, is people who are more nominally left, like Kyle or Crystal, or these people whose idea of you need to get serious about power was to support –
Marianne Williamson. That was their idea of being a grown-up and making a serious bid for power, supporting the Topanga Canyon guru that they had become enamored of. And now what makes you serious is to get on board with Kamala Harris. And it really just shows you, it is kind of sad. Most of the Bernie Sanders movement, most of the people who came through that movement
Part of the reason the Democrats were able to foist Kamala Harris on the country is because we all left. I mean, basically the people who were serious about it left. All you have at this point is,
are, you know, it's Oliver Twist. Please, sir, may I have some more? It's a bunch of people who are just content to be peasants, to get on their knees, where appointing Tim Walz is enough. That's enough. He had a free lunch, and it really shows that the critique a lot of hard leftists have of social Democrats has a lot of validity because they have long argued that
The problem with social Democrats is they don't care who their policies are built on the backs of.
They don't care if people have to suffer all around the world so that they can get their policy priorities met. I don't think there's ever been a more stark example of this than seeing all these people who have been cashing in on views and clicks on Gaza for the last 10 months, flipping on a dime over free school lunches in Minnesota. And that's all it took.
Fuck the Palestinians. Let them die. Well, it just showed that they weren't ever serious. I mean, Cenk Uygur went around calling people monsters. At the top of his lungs, the most indignant, almost crying on camera on Piers Morgan. And oh my God, you're monsters. And then he's like, hey, you know what? I'm going to vote for that monster.
And he actually said, I will give him some credit, unlike the rest of them who are trying to adorn themselves with the fig leaf of, well, wait until she gets elected. That's when you're going to see what she really thinks. She's just playing along right now. You...
You are going to see that with all of these podcasters. But Shank came out and he actually said straight out, I'm not naive. I don't think she's going to change policy.
I will give him some credit. I will give him some credit that he said straight out, I don't give a fuck about this genocide that I was bloviating to the point that they had a medical standby team when I was on Piers Morgan, afraid I was going to have a stroke on the air there. I never really cared about it. Free launch, that's enough. That's enough. I want to be inside. I don't want to be an outsider. I want to be an insider. Yep. Okay. I just...
I'll still, I can't get over when I was in that, when I was in the convention hall and there was not one person, not one person not applauding, not cheering. There wasn't a discussion. There wasn't a debate of ideas. There was nothing. They weren't cheering? They were cheering. They were all cheering on corruption and more war and abortion. You know, I told you, they talk about abortion like it's Christmas. Right.
Well, that's the thing. These Morning Joe monologues do have an effect in that way. In a way, it is a signal to these progressives, hey, stop
stirring the pot and we will blow smoke up your ass. Notice, you know, they used to hate Bernie Sanders. They used to hate the squad. When is the last time Bernie or the squad or Warren have had a hostile interview on MSNBC? Never. Never. A long time because they signal to you, hey, get serious, meaning keep your mouth shut. Applaud Kamala Harris, applaud Joe Biden, and we will cover you the way you want to be covered. If you stick to your principles, we're going to smear you every chance we get.
Okay. All right, fellas, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you for your commentary. Everybody check out Do Dissidents. Am I saying that correct? Do Dissidents, yeah. Of course. Okay. I always... I got worried too. It's a funny word because there's a word that sounds just like it spelled with a T.
And do dissonance. So many people have mistook us for do dissonance that if you put in YouTube do dissonance, we come up anyway. Oh, okay. That's good. If you search do dissonance on YouTube, we come up anyway. So either way. Okay. All right. Thanks for it. It's always great to talk to you. Everybody check out their show. It's the one I watch from... I watch it on the live stream. That's how good. That's how much I like it. Okay. Well, thank you so much. All right. All right.
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Do not freak out.
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