Actor Adam Baldwin joins Jemele to discuss his new show, The Last Ship, and why he thinks it s one of the most underrated sitcoms of all time. He also discusses his new role on The Walking Dead, why he doesn t want to do another sitcom, and what it s like being on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
00:00:26.000So glad to have this next guest on the program.
00:00:29.000Let's get the formalities out of the way.
00:00:30.000But of course, if you don't know who he is, I mean, Full Metal Jacket is where I first saw him when I watched it at a point that was completely age-inappropriate.
00:01:39.000No, but we've always talked about having you on, and I just know you're so busy that it's one of those things where I don't want to bother you.
00:01:46.000And then I saw that you were doing every Tom, Dick, and Harry's podcast, so I said, hey, hold on a second.
00:02:49.000I remember even back when Chuck was going on, that was kind of always, well, what's going to happen with it?
00:02:52.000Even with the successful shows, which is why I wonder, you know, when I watch something like The Walking Dead, they'll write like two seasons out, you know, a character that'll come back from season one to season five, and the story wouldn't be complete without it.
00:03:07.000Is that just sort of a risk you take with series like this?
00:03:10.000Because, I mean, you know in this industry how volatile it can be.
00:03:13.000Even if the show's doing well, some guy can go, ah, I want to try something different!
00:03:18.000Shows that are well put together generally have what we like to call a bible in that you can have it stretch out over a five year period or three year period so that they can do that.
00:03:31.000The other ones that sort of fly by the seat of their pants can get caught Oh, we're getting picked up again?
00:05:17.000And at this point, someone knew that I was conservative.
00:05:21.000And no, at this point, I had been with Fox News for a very little amount of time because I started off as an actor-comedian long before that.
00:05:27.000And so I was still kind of in this transition phase where I was still with my old agents and they had no idea what to do with it because all of a sudden I was working at Fox.
00:05:35.000And I was in there, you know, with these hosting gigs, they put you in and kind of circulate you with other co-hosts.
00:05:41.000And he goes, oh, so you've been at Fox News?
00:05:43.000He says, so, like, have you done, like, Huckabee's show?
00:07:44.000Well, I think at first there was resistance to my right-of-center political viewpoints.
00:07:52.000But when the ticking Gamergate, for example, when they came up against the authoritarian leftists in their midst, they realized that, hey, I'd rather be with this guy than those guys who are trying to shut me up.
00:08:09.000Because I don't want to shut anybody up.
00:08:24.000But Gamergate's fascinating and I got involved because I saw something fly through the Twitter feed and it was a video post about some corruption in journalism pegged to some girl who had had an affair which I don't really care about.
00:08:42.000That doesn't rise to the level of the gate suffix in Gamergate.
00:08:53.000Private peccadillos are not a scandal.
00:08:55.000What is a scandal is what happened with the gaming journalists and with some of the developers and also the political infusion of radical feminism that came in that gamers are like, we don't want this crap in our video games.
00:11:18.000I don't know if you see that happening, but I know you've been really involved with that, and like I said, you seem to gain sort of acceptance.
00:11:23.000I don't know if it's because you're large and they're physically afraid of you, or what?
00:11:30.000Perhaps my foot in the door was the fact that I had some cultural cachet from Firefly and Serenity and some other sci-fi things, X-Files, whatnot.
00:14:00.000You're like, ah, those bleep and bleep.
00:14:02.000And I was sitting there going, we just switched from one to the other.
00:14:04.000And there's nothing wrong with that because you're out there on the front lines.
00:14:08.000And I don't think a lot of people understand what it's like to be a Christian in a public sphere like you are, have to reach those kinds of people.
00:14:14.000You don't get to be, I forgot his name, the guy who ended up being a pedophile.
00:14:19.000Damn it, ruin the joke, the seventh heaven father.
00:15:04.000I am imperfect, and I am rough around the edges, as is everyone, and those that claim not to be, those that claim to be perfect, are liars.
00:15:14.000No, but I noticed that, and it's tough because you get it from all sides, right?
00:15:18.000And that's what the Founding Fathers knew and tried to And did for, well, up until now, I guess, enshrine into our Constitution the fact that we don't want to be ruled by imperfect men.
00:15:29.000We want to be ruled by law, law that is determined by the will of the people, the consent of the governed.
00:15:59.000We're not even going to get into the whole gay thing if two dudes want to shack up.
00:16:03.000But finding something as a human right that isn't a right in the Constitution, do you believe that it is...
00:16:10.000Outside the realm of possibility, or am I being illogical and saying if they can find that right, and they don't really recognize a constitutional right in the Second Amendment, they still allow states to infringe upon that, that we could be one Supreme Court vote away from really losing access to firearms?
00:16:41.000Well, I don't mean they're going to say, hey, we're going to ban guns today.
00:16:43.000I'm going back to your paperboy voice.
00:16:44.000I mean, you saw the ammo shortage that happened.
00:16:47.000It's just so easy to manipulate the firearm market, kind of like Smith& Wesson had to put those locks in their revolvers, and it just changed the whole market.
00:16:55.000There are so many little things that can happen that could really create some volatility there where it would make it near impossible for the average American.
00:17:04.000There are more than enough guns out there to outnumber the federal government, surely, and the state militias, surely, and who's going to comply.
00:17:16.000You'd have to have everyone complying, and that just won't happen.
00:17:19.000And you'd also have to have everyone in the federal government forces complying with the orders, and I don't think that would happen either.
00:17:27.000I've talked to a lot of law enforcement We're not going to enforce that.
00:17:37.000They're not going to go door to door and kick in the houses of law-abiding citizens.
00:17:43.000They may do it once or twice, but after that, the resistance will build.
00:18:00.000Yeah, that's one thing I always find funny.
00:18:02.000They go, oh what, so you think that a bunch of people with AR-15s and some pistols are going to fight off the government with nuclear bombs?
00:19:59.000Circling back to the constitutional argument and the last two Supreme Court decisions, there's an old saying that where the Constitution is silent, it's left to the states, and that's not what happened here.
00:20:12.000So you do have, again, what Levin calls a judicial tyranny, and that's scary.
00:20:17.000So, will people comply is the next question.
00:22:35.000Just a few people on Twitter, they have an algorithm where they can replicate themselves into what they call bots and sock puppet accounts.
00:22:49.000Ten people can generate 5,000 emails to a promoter.
00:22:56.000At first, if the promoter is not prepared, it can catch him off guard.
00:23:01.000You see this in other cultural issues as well.
00:23:05.000People get slammed with a bunch of emails and they react.
00:23:08.000I mean, Bubba Watson, I guess, has now taken the Confederate flag off of the General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard, which I think is an overreaction.
00:23:22.000You can say what you like about the damn flag, love it or hate it, but the car is the car, and you're going to destroy the value of it by defacing it.
00:23:32.000Whether you put an American flag on it or not is not the issue.
00:23:42.000I grew up in the North, so I don't have a dog in that hunt.
00:23:46.000And I think a lot of people are just overreacting because they're looking to point the finger away from the over-drugged leftist crazy kid who...
00:24:31.000All I can see from what he's doing on the immigration issue is he's raising the issue however, as they like to say, inartfully the language may be.
00:25:05.000He's given way more to Democrats and Republicans, gave to the Clinton Foundation, both Senate and now.
00:25:10.000He was for illegal immigration, was for socialized health care, was for abortion.
00:25:15.000So I just – Andrew Breitbart said he wasn't conservative and I go, OK, I'm a little leery.
00:25:18.000But I agree with you that this is valuable.
00:25:20.000My only issue is when conservatives sort of throw other conservatives under the bus and go, well, Donald Trump is the only one saying it.
00:25:26.000When someone like Rick Perry has been saying it for a long time, he's just not been saying it in a bombastic way and so he gets overlooked.
00:26:30.000preference for a governor, an executive, to step into that role like Scott Walker, so he would probably be my favorite, but At this point, we don't know.
00:27:26.000And so what happened was he went full on, you know, Tropic Thunder with the birth certificate and it allowed other GO peers to say, well, you know what?
00:27:34.000He's out of line on that, but he's right in that there is a lack of transparency and they can sort of draft in.
00:27:40.000I see that as valuable, but I see him maybe overreaching.
00:27:44.000And yeah, I do think he could damage the party if he goes too far off the reservation.
00:27:49.000So he could damage the party in the eyes of MSNBC and the Washington Post and the New York Times?
00:27:55.000No, in the eyes of everyday Americans.
00:27:57.000I mean, you know, people, most people, if you look at them who watch like Celebrity Apprentice, I mean, you know these numbers, anywhere between 20, 30, I mean, it's a highly rated show.
00:28:12.000Anyone who reads his book will think he's a horrendous person.
00:28:15.000I mean, if you read his Art of the Comeback, he just says some really mean-spirited things.
00:28:18.000So my thing is I'm going, yeah, he can definitely get in front of the media, but if they can attribute some of the horrendous things he said to conservatives, I think that could be a rough crime.
00:28:29.000Well, they're going to do that anyway.
00:29:22.000You don't think that there's really any way that Donald Trump could be more of a liability than people have already been in the GOP. Is that sort of fair to say?
00:30:27.000She's French-Canadian and she will say – she would like – I would love her in a cabinet because she would deal with illegal immigration.
00:30:33.000If someone had to go through it legally, she would just be like, well, you know, it was very hard for me to get my card.
00:32:08.000No, I mean, like, you're not getting the...
00:32:10.000I mean, you don't look like a figurine.
00:32:12.000Maybe you're getting just really good microdermabrasions, but, you know, like I said, it seems like you're willing to age into, you know...
00:34:07.000So it's a rough night for him if he goes out with us and we're just having a few beers over the course of the evening with some Mexican food.
00:34:41.000A lot of mass-produced cider, and then I'll bring this back to the culture war, Adam.
00:34:45.000A lot of mass-produced cider is actually apple juice sort of reconstituted, and they just add in alcohol as opposed to like real fermented cider.
00:38:34.000It really comes down to the cultural...
00:38:37.000The divide that was created back in the 60s through the 70s and all that stuff with abortion and gay marriage and gay rights, those are the divisive issues for Hollywood because Hollywood is culturally very accepting of all different kinds of people, as long as they're good-looking.
00:39:55.000He's on Morning Show here, and I won't do it justice on how he described it, but basically he said that the problem with the Republican Party is that they won't address each individual person or group's number one issue and embrace it,
00:40:15.000whereas the Democrats will take Each individual group's number one issue, be it abortion, be it taxes, be it whatever, and they'll embrace it and say, yep, we're on your side, and they'll get that group, whereas the GOP is more like, well, no, we can agree with you on this, but we can't agree with you on that, and they'll reject the number one issue for that one group or person, and they'll lose them as voters over one issue.
00:40:41.000Shapiro explained it much more articulately than that, but that's basically the gist.
00:40:46.000Yeah, well, my brother out there listens to that show and actually really likes the liberal guy in that show.
00:40:50.000He's like, they treat him like crap, and he's actually really funny.
00:40:54.000This one guy in there is kind of liberal, but he's really funny, and they just crap all over him.
00:40:58.000Yeah, not evil, like Andrew said, not evil, just wrong.
00:41:02.000Yeah, and my brother's like, they treat him pretty harshly, and he seems like a decent guy.
00:41:07.000Maybe it's their shtick, but Andrew was really good about that too, and Andrew sort of, I remember talking about abortion with them at one point, and you realize that there are arguments to be made on both of those cultural issues that don't need to be faith-based, that don't need to be fire and brimstone, that can be made logically, and it's just not the arguments that the GOP, for whatever reason, has picked up.
00:41:29.000The GOP makes a mistake in Only embracing it as a social or religious issue, which it is, but it's mainly a political issue.
00:41:42.000And it has to be addressed that way because you're never going to get it to zero, where there's zero abortions that are allowed, and you're never going to get it to 100%.
00:41:52.000So somewhere in between is the compromise politically.
00:43:11.000But that to me is where I think there's a disconnect between sort of the James Camerons, the really progressive leftists who are for late-term abortions and most of, like you said, the rank-and-file people, even culturally.
00:43:23.000I don't think you'd find a ton of liberals across this country who would be for abortion past 22 weeks.
00:43:33.000I think that knee-jerk reaction, no, no, no, comes from their fear of the slippery slope, that it will get rolled back to zero, which it won't.
00:43:44.000That's just irrational to think that it would go all the way back to zero.
00:43:47.000Much as I or you may want that, you can't get it.
00:43:52.000So you have to look and live in the real world, and the real world is there's a compromise at some point And my cutoff would be, okay, does the baby have...
00:44:57.000I mean there definitely is sort of a constant there where when the Supreme Court just says we're going to decide and people feel like they didn't have a chance to hash it out, the issue was never put to bed.
00:45:23.000And it was – I was surprised being in LA and I think people don't realize how conservative California can be once you go out of LA and San Francisco.
00:45:30.000And people voted on it and Prop 8 and it was voted.
00:45:34.000I remember it was nowhere near as volatile after Prop 8 even though you had the gay rights activists who were mad.
00:45:39.000It was nowhere near as volatile as when the court went back and just overturned it.
00:45:43.000That's when people got really pissed because they felt like their voice didn't matter.
00:45:50.000And it's also the further away you get from the locality.
00:45:54.000Again, the U.S. Constitution, federal constitution is silent on the matter, so the states should decide it on their own.
00:46:01.000I guess Justice Kennedy and the other three or four, whoever, three, whatever it was, the four liberals, they just, by fiat, said, nope, we get to decide.
00:47:13.000I'm going, well, you didn't consult the slave in the matter.
00:47:15.000So I don't think I'm being inconsistent by saying, yes, the federal government needed to step in.
00:47:20.000To make sure everyone had unalienable rights, that all men were created equal before states' rights.
00:47:27.000And I can't for the life of me see how that's inconsistent, but a lot of conservatives have gotten mad at me and basically say I'm a statist for being Team Lincoln.
00:47:38.000Yeah, well, they're on the losing side.
00:47:40.000They're not sure it's the wrong side, but it was the losing side.
00:47:43.000Yeah, and those are the same people who say this country is gone.
00:47:46.000I was surprised at the 4th of July, people going, it's not a great country anymore.
00:47:49.000I'm going, let me guess, you're a confederate, you conceded the first war, so you're so quick to concede the war now, I guess, and roll over.
00:48:48.000And what I'm talking about is there was a law – a pretty big conservative contingency who were not talking about the flag and businesses running the flag.
00:48:56.000They have every right to sell the flag.
00:48:58.000Everyone has the right to fly whatever flag they want.
00:49:00.000But supporting it under the idea that it was states' rights to either enforce slavery or not and that it didn't need to be federally abolished.
00:49:08.000And I thought that was such a missed opportunity for conservatives.
00:49:13.000We're not going to have a better ambassador, right, as a starting off point.
00:49:17.000that's true Another thing you've got to look at is who's running corporations now and What are they looking at?
00:49:24.000If they're looking at social media, so you've got a lot of young people in the social media sphere in corporations that raise these red flags.
00:49:34.000So instead of them just saying, just don't say anything.
00:49:38.000Like Bubba Watson, he could have just not said anything and left the General Lee in his garage, and it would have blown over, and the car would have maintained its value.
00:49:47.000I don't think he's going to paint it over.
00:50:20.000The crew of the Nathan James has survived the initial apocalypse and is traveling in and around the Norfolk area, and they run into a group of bad guys on land that are immune.