Rob Schneider is a beloved American entertainer, comedian, actor, and writer best known for his work on Saturday Night Live and dozens of comedies including 50 First Dates, Grown Ups, and You Don t Mess With the Zohan. Schneider is also the author of his latest book, You Can Do It, which shares lessons learned from Hollywood and makes the case for pushing the boundaries of free speech with comedy. In today s episode, we discuss his frustrations with the Democratic establishment in Hollywood, why he left California, and the upsides of being canceled. Rob also forecasts trends in the comedy industry, offers his diagnosis of the liberal establishment, and encourages other entertainers to follow his lead.
00:00:17.000Rob Schneider is a beloved American entertainer, comedian, actor, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live and dozens of comedies, including 50 First Dates, Grown Ups, and You Don't Mess With the Zohan.
00:00:27.000Schneider is also the author of his latest book, You Can Do It, which shares lessons learned from Hollywood and makes the case for pushing the boundaries of free speech with comedy.
00:00:35.000In today's episode, we discuss his frustrations with the Democratic establishment in Hollywood, why he left California, and the upsides of being canceled.
00:00:42.000Schneider also forecasts trends in the comedy industry, offers his diagnosis of the liberal establishment, and encourages other entertainers to follow his lead.
00:00:49.000As a Hollywood veteran and advocate of free speech, Rob is on a mission to shape the future of his industry.
00:00:53.000Don't miss Rob Schneider's wit and wisdom in this latest episode of the Sunday Special.
00:00:57.000Rob Schneider, it's great to see you here on the Sunday Special.
00:01:12.000I have my smarty pants glasses on so that I can appear intelligent and don't have the usual meltdown as your university students have when you tear them apart on the debate stage.
00:01:25.000I appreciate that, although I don't know what Rachel Maddow will do without her glasses now that you've got them.
00:03:12.000But somebody did send out I completely support Kamala supposedly before the Democratic intelligentsia all got behind her.
00:03:23.000And that's why supposedly, another supposedly, that's why Obama waited three days to see if they can kind of undo this, and they realized they couldn't.
00:03:31.000They made the fake phone call with Michelle and supported Kamala.
00:03:45.000And then they tried to blame him for not allowing them to have their little mini-primary process, which would have been rigged in Kamala Harris' favor anyway, because there was no way they could shove aside the black female intersectional hero in favor of, like, what?
00:03:58.000The Jew, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, or in favor of, you know, genderless Ken Dahl, Gavin Newsom in California, or J.B. Pritzker, who has to be lowered into the state capitol by Crane?
00:04:07.000Like, who exactly was going to be their candidate?
00:04:10.000It was really funny when Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, whatever, come out during COVID and talk about health.
00:04:30.000They were stuck in a really tough, tough position.
00:04:33.000They could never have passed over Kamala because a woman with many ethnicities and many accents, God knows, seeing her down south and also, you got to save democracy.
00:04:49.000And then seeing her in Pittsburgh, let me tell you something.
00:05:08.000So it seemed like she wasn't the best prepared person for this very important job of running for president.
00:05:16.000Well, I mean, that's one side of the hilarious coin.
00:05:18.000The other side of the hilarious coin is just the fact that Donald Trump is a world historical figure.
00:05:22.000And that is in and of itself innately hilarious.
00:05:25.000Like if you had made a joke about that in 2002, and many people made jokes about this sort of thing in 2002, it would have just been a joke.
00:05:32.000And then it turns out that actually he is a world historically important figure.
00:05:36.000Donald Trump with all the foibles, with all the craziness, with all of the hilarity that is attended upon him.
00:05:41.000But you're not supposed to even laugh at him.
00:05:43.000According to the left, you're not allowed to laugh at Kamala Harris because she's a magical person.
00:05:46.000And you're not allowed to laugh at Donald Trump because he's Hitler.
00:05:58.000He is a stand-up comedian working a room.
00:06:01.000When he says, I'm going to be, you know, dictator, but just on day one, he's joking.
00:06:06.000And then for them to run with it, like, he promised he's going to be dictator.
00:06:11.000I mean, when Robert Kennedy said a couple of days ago, if he follows through on what he says he's going to do with free speech and hopefully getting rid of the Department of Education...
00:06:24.000He stands to be the most consequential president since Lincoln.
00:06:38.000Because, again, I think that because he shatters the image that so many people have of what the president is or quote-unquote should be— They miss the fact that underneath all of the showmanship is a very serious person who has very serious policies and who is bringing in an excellent team at this point.
00:06:53.000And so what I'd start off by saying with you is just like, all of this should be really, really funny, right?
00:06:58.000I mean, the fact that Donald Trump was at a McDonald's and that he has the sort of, you know, he has the sort of Self-knowledge, to understand, okay, I'm not going to put on jeans and a t-shirt and work on my tie.
00:07:09.000I'm going to wear a $2,000 suit, and I'm going to wear my tie, and then I'm going to just put on an apron and serve people fries out the window and make some of the funniest images in the history of presidential politics.
00:07:18.000I mean, how many memes did you see of him waving out the window, and it was like, Donald Trump to illegal immigrants in 2026, right?
00:07:25.000That stuff is innately funny, but if you make jokes about it on the left, then they get angry at you.
00:07:31.000Because you're not supposed to laugh at the fact that Donald Trump's a funny person or that this whole thing is really funny.
00:09:03.000Of Trump are good and sound, but the form for a lot of Americans was hard to stomach in the form of Donald Trump and how he manages to goad the Democratic Party and people in the middle.
00:09:20.000And I think people just got to get over it.
00:09:21.000And I tell people, I don't think there's such thing as conservatives anymore.
00:10:01.000I did a debate with Sam Harris, and that's exactly the analogy I used.
00:10:04.000It's like when I elect a politician, I'm not electing a moral exemplar.
00:10:08.000I have plenty of people in my life who I look to when I'm looking for, you know, moral ways to live.
00:10:13.000If I'm looking for a piece of life advice, I'm not going to go to President Trump.
00:10:16.000When I want somebody to threaten Iran to back down, then I go to President Trump.
00:10:22.000When I want somebody who's going to make sure that the gas prices aren't too high by drilling more, I go to President Trump.
00:10:27.000As you say, when you call this whole bizarre notion that we're supposed to look at the president of the United States as though he's a great angelic leader who descends from on high with a halo around his head.
00:10:39.000We tried that with Barack Obama, and it was terrible because he tried to embody all those qualities.
00:10:43.000And it turns out that he was just as venal and corrupt and terrible as anybody in the history of American politics.
00:10:48.000But you couldn't criticize him because he had the angel wings on.
00:10:50.000And so Donald Trump just took all that stuff off.
00:10:52.000He's like, listen, there ain't going to be no halo.
00:11:02.000And also, it's a way to communicate with people who seem to have a real problem with the character over substance and with the person over policy.
00:11:11.000And I think Americans are going to have to get over that.
00:11:13.000And I think they were forced to get over it this time.
00:11:34.000I mean, can you imagine how fast they would have shut down the Haitians from flying into Ohio if they knew they were going to vote for Republicans?
00:11:41.000And they would have said, no more, you know.
00:11:49.000It just became a comedy that was too close for most Americans to laugh at.
00:11:52.000The fact that they were discussing eating cats in Ohio and the fact that somehow Democrats were so offended by the idea that these immigrants were being accused of eating pets.
00:12:05.000I was there in 1979 in San Francisco when the Vietnamese people came over and they saw they were eating the ducks in Golden Gate Park.
00:12:39.000I found it to be hilarious that people got so upset.
00:12:42.000That they were accusing these Haitians, whose part of their practice and their religion is animal sacrifice, that they would be accused of this horrible thing.
00:12:50.000Also, I mean, like, listen, Donald Trump, like, his inflection is hilarious.
00:12:54.000Okay, my kids walk around the house going, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.
00:12:58.000I had my four-year-old yesterday, she has a shirt that says on it, they're eating the dogs.
00:13:02.000Like, it's just, like, it's innately the funniest thing, like, this whole race, like, from just a comedic perspective.
00:13:22.000Whichever one of those two men golfs better, we will make president of the United States.
00:13:26.000He will be introduced at the RNC by Hulk Hogan, who will tear open his shirt to reveal that he's supporting Donald Trump.
00:13:33.000And then that presidential candidate will get up on stage and ramble for 93 straight minutes, and you will love it because this is America.
00:13:49.000You know how amazing our institutions are?
00:13:51.000That's what we could just do for an entire election cycle.
00:13:54.000And then at the end of it, we're still the most powerful country on Earth.
00:13:56.000We've got the most powerful military, and don't screw with us.
00:13:59.000But I will tell you, though, as I agree with you, we've become a worldwide wrestling enterprise of entertainment.
00:14:05.000At the same time, we really were, Ben, and you would agree with this, I would hope, teetering on the abyss with these elites and...
00:14:14.000It's a strange aristocracy that seems to be taking over American society, which instead of a Lord or Duke, it was PhD and elite and expert.
00:14:23.000And these people who were telling us basically who we have to vote for, who we need to vote for.
00:14:30.000And we really were, you know, once you dig underneath and see some of the bad things that the Biden-Harris What the regime was doing was censorship and silencing Americans and their First Amendment rights.
00:14:44.000I don't think that's something to be taken lightly.
00:14:47.000I think they really were in danger of moving us towards, truthfully, a A one-party system like they have in California.
00:14:56.000And I tell this to people, I say, we're America.
00:15:06.000And what the Democrats were really trying to do for the last four years, I mean, actually for the last, I think, 20 years, was to have a forever Democrat party.
00:15:14.000And they said, you can have free elections.
00:15:15.000You can elect whoever, whichever Democrat you want.
00:15:20.000And the Republicans, of course, the cowardly Congress, you know, they're happy because 93%, they get elected, they get re-elected, and so they would like to lose gracefully and honorably and shake their finger at them, but never have to actually do anything.
00:15:34.000And so I think that this was important because I think we were teetering on making America like California.
00:15:42.000I think we're both California expatriates, right?
00:15:44.000I spent my entire life in California until the last...
00:15:47.000We moved in the middle of Black Lives Matter riots and wildfires and the rest of the biblical plagues.
00:15:52.000We moved from there to the great free state of Florida.
00:15:55.000You're in Arizona, as I understand it, which is a state that is increasingly turning red.
00:15:59.000Donald Trump has turned it back from—it was red.
00:16:01.000It went kind of purply blue, and now it's turning back red again.
00:16:05.000And some of that is Donald Trump, and some of that is when you let in 10 million illegal immigrants across borders, including Arizona's border.
00:16:10.000That has some pretty dire effects on the state of Arizona.
00:16:12.000What was it that caused you to leave California?
00:16:14.000I knew that there was a pincher move happening.
00:16:18.000As soon as Obama in 2013 allowed the governmental agencies to have propaganda in America against Americans in 2013, that was the beginning of, I felt, tyranny coming from the left.
00:16:37.000I always just assume, because I'm kind of brainwashed like everybody else in California, you just assume the left's always good, and that the right is the problem.
00:16:47.000And that if problems do come, if there's fascism coming, whatever that is, depending on what the definition of the day is, then it's going to come from the right.
00:16:58.000Because what happened was, if you grew up in the late 70s, and if the consequential power of the Democrats, it was a mess under Jimmy Carter.
00:17:08.000And the thing is, there seemed to be an appeal that the Democrats had for the fellow man to help the average worker.
00:17:16.000But what the truth is, they will say they'll be behind the average worker when they have no power.
00:17:22.000But when they do have power, they don't do anything.
00:17:24.000Obama didn't do anything for the people, and that was such a real turnoff for a lot of people, and people who thought good could come out of that administration, but it clearly didn't.
00:17:34.000As far as, you know, taking the American public and the goodwill that was given and instead of saying, you know, maybe we're less racist now because we elected a black president two times to exacerbate it and to further, you know, throw gasoline on the flames and say, you know, this has never been just as Douglas Murray says, just when race has never been better in America, they accuse it as never being worse.
00:18:02.000And then by the time COVID came in, I knew they were going to close society down.
00:18:06.000I knew that this was not the place to be.
00:18:07.000I got young kids as well, and I wanted to get them the hell out.
00:18:11.000And I said, you know, Because California is a dangerous place if you've got little kids.
00:18:16.000Public school, in the morning, you take your school and drop off a little girl.
00:18:20.000In the afternoon, you pick up a little boy.
00:18:22.000you know so that's a problem i mean we were in california just a couple of weeks ago and right there on the street we were we'd had dinner uh and with a couple of friends who are still unfortunately trapped in california and we had dinner i have 24 7 security unfortunately i have to have that so i went down the street one way with my wife my friends went down the street the other way they go about three cars down they're getting into their tesla another car pulls up right in front of them three guys jump out grab my friend pull him out of his car steal his phone steal his wallet steal
00:18:48.000his keys run around to his wife start taking her jewelry off of her and uh and then she screamed and they realized their time had run and they they ran away i mean it's just like open-air robberies in california I thought you were going to say it.
00:19:05.000It was on 3rd Street and La Cienega, right?
00:19:08.000I mean, we're not talking about, like, the worst areas of LA here.
00:19:10.000We're not talking about, like, you're in the heart of East LA or in South Central, which has now been retitled South LA, so that means it's okay now.
00:19:16.000It's not like you're in Crenshaw or something, like high crime areas of the city.
00:19:18.000You're talking about, like, a fairly decent area of LA, and it's just been totally trashed.
00:19:24.000It's amazing what they've done to the state of California, and that caused me to go on the air the next day and say, listen, You think out there, you in political land, you think that Donald Trump, he says offensive things and he says mean things and you don't like his tweets.
00:19:36.000The normal American, you know what we care about?
00:19:38.000We care about not getting robbed on the street.
00:19:40.000We care about our gas prices going down.
00:19:41.000We care about inflation not eating up our entire checkbook.
00:19:48.000Basic, practical things are the things we care about.
00:19:50.000And the worse you make it, and then insist that actually we're stupid for not understanding what you're doing, then the more we want to vote for the other guy.
00:19:57.000And the crazier he is, the more we want to vote for him a little bit.
00:20:00.000When I heard Bruce Springsteen at a diner, trying to be like an average guy, looking like an average guy, knowing that he had sold his catalog for $800 million like 36 months ago, you're not an average guy.
00:20:17.000Oprah, you live in not only a gated community, You live in the inside of the gated, gated community.
00:20:24.000You know, like in the old days of Jack Nicholson, there'd be a party and then there's a VIP section, then there's a VIP, VIP, and then there's one room, the one guy in it is Jack Nicholson.
00:20:34.000And then like, like, cause I lived up in Calabasas and then we were in a gated community, but then there was another part that was like Kim Kardashian.
00:20:41.000That's another, you couldn't get in there, you know, for, I hope that the celebrities trying to shame people and scare people and say it's the end of democracy.
00:21:05.000And it doesn't, they don't know what it's like.
00:21:07.000I mean, like when Jimmy Kimmel's crying about like, you Demi, you Trump support, you guys voted, you made a mistake too, which is pathetic.
00:21:16.000But the fact of the matter is we get two choices and we're gonna choose somebody to date.
00:21:21.000And I said this, I said, if avocados go up to, you know, if the food prices go up 26%, it's not gonna bother Jimmy Kimmel and his family or Oprah's family, but the average person driving their kid to school, And then having to drive to work and then get groceries and having to think, I don't know if I can do both this week.
00:22:37.000For a complimentary consultation, call today, 1-800-958-1000, or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro.
00:22:45.000That's 1-800-958-1000, or visit tnusa.com slash Shapiro today to let the IRS take advantage of you and get the help you need with Tax Network USA. I want to ask you about the impact that you think Hollywood has had on all of this.
00:22:57.000Because one of the things that I think about the Trump phenomenon is that there's a lot of talk about the economic outreach that Trump has done to blue-collar communities and working people.
00:23:06.000But when I go and I speak in these communities, and I spent a lot of time on the road this election cycle going and talking everywhere from the southern border campaigning with Senator Cruz to now Senator Moreno up in Ohio and all the way up to the tip top of Ohio.
00:23:18.000And the thing that you see when you do this is that it's really not about government subsidies.
00:23:24.000It really isn't about a hatred of trade.
00:23:26.000What it really is is they're sick of being told that their church is bad.
00:23:30.000They're sick of being told that their culture is bad.
00:23:32.000And so to me, it seems like a lot of this is a rebellion against the moral values that they see mostly coming from Hollywood, a Hollywood that insists that the morality of, you know, moonlight is the morality that we all must, you know, love.
00:23:47.000Like, the thing that we really need is a shape-of-water lecture about how capitalism is bad and about how traditional churchgoing is bad and I think people just rebelled against that.
00:23:59.000They said, okay, all of you schmucks are going to P. Diddy's white parties and then telling us that we're bad for having gone to church this Sunday.
00:24:08.000It's a giant orange middle finger just for you.
00:24:10.000I feel like it's been the thing since about 2015, 2016. Well, you have a group of people and it isn't any coincidence that every place that the Democrats and Kamala Harris won had no voter ID. I mean, there's no coincidence that that happened.
00:24:29.000You have people that are getting tired of being told that they're racist when they're not racist.
00:24:33.000You're getting tired of telling people that they Whether they know it or not, they're in a system of white supremacy.
00:25:15.000If you become a billionaire, we're going to applaud you.
00:25:18.000You go, girl, because we know that this is a system that allows that potentiality.
00:25:22.000And so for you to crap on it, and to crap on people who are just trying to get by, and just going month to month, paycheck to paycheck, and that's getting harder and harder, and you seem to think that there's other things more important than that.
00:25:33.000And by exaggerating a situation which isn't true, that Donald Trump is going to turn this into a dictatorship in a fascist state, I think the belittling was just vomitous at a certain point.
00:25:47.000I think that if you look at where the Democrats have come and what they've tried to do, and you just have to look at California as what they would like for the rest of the country.
00:25:57.000There's not one aspect of our life that they don't want to interfere with.
00:26:18.000The fact that the teachers, that they passed a law and legislation that the school and the teachers could keep information away from the parents...
00:27:06.000We don't want a, we don't want government to be that big.
00:27:08.000And I think that they, they finally, the voters, I've said enough with this, enough with the colony names, enough with boys, failed narcissistic male athletes in girls' sports, taking refuge in girls' sports.
00:27:21.000So I think Americans rejected this soundly.
00:27:24.000And I think what you're going to have, if you take a look at history, and I think you might agree with this, and I definitely think you would hope for this, the last time we had three one-term presidents, if you go, you know, Ford, well, Nixon, Ford, Carter, The last time we had that, now we have Trump, Biden, and then another Trump.
00:27:46.000That's why I think it's wonderful that he's not going to seek re-election or because he's going to now have better people around him and put in policies for his legacy.
00:27:54.000I think you might get lucky here and we can have a Trump Vance, Vance.
00:28:00.000And then you'd have a Democratic Party that'll be able to come back to lose their extremists and realize if they want to be a party that's going to get elected at the highest level, they're going to have to come back from this crazy lunacy and do like what the Clinton administration, which was, we are pro-death penalty.
00:28:27.000And I'm hopeful that that's what's gonna happen, and that's what we need to happen.
00:28:31.000Stabilize America, keep out the crazies, and the Democrats come back to a place of normalcy.
00:28:35.000So I wanted to ask you about how things have gone for you in Hollywood since you've become more overtly political.
00:28:40.000So back in 2014, I wrote a book called Primetime Propaganda, where I actually went and I spoke with the creators of pretty much every major television show over the last 50 years.
00:28:48.000And some of it was pretty shocking, because when I went and did these interviews, I asked them if I wanted to write a book about the legacy of TV. They didn't know who I was at the time.
00:28:56.000I was not nearly as well-known as I am now.
00:28:58.000I wore my Harvard Law baseball cap, and my last name was Shapiro, so they immediately assumed that I was basically a communist, which in 90% of cases is actually true.
00:29:30.000That's why they were so desperate to keep her from being challenged by anybody because she didn't have the goods.
00:29:35.000So when you went there to California, you had the goods.
00:29:38.000You were prepared and you tore them apart.
00:29:40.000And they just, they're intellectually lazy in California.
00:29:43.000And as you saw, they weren't able to...
00:29:45.000So in that particular case, I recorded all these interviews, and many of them in the interviews would openly say things like, I won't hire a conservative.
00:29:52.000If I find out that somebody is conservative in Hollywood, I'll fire them.
00:29:54.000I remember this created a major scandal actually at the Directors Guild because one of the directors said this, and our friend Lionel Chetwin, he came out really firing over it.
00:30:22.000But when I've talked to Patty about this, Patty said at one point, and she was working on a major network show at the time, she said, listen, I don't feel like I'm getting a lot of pushback on my politics.
00:30:30.000And then after I talked to her, she called back...
00:30:33.000Maybe a few days later, and she said, I called around.
00:30:35.000I found out that over the years I've lost five specific jobs thanks to my politics.
00:30:38.000So what do you make of the sort of anti-conservative discrimination?
00:30:55.000I mean, when you have not just the presidential candidate, who maybe she doesn't know, but I find it difficult for her to believe that she wouldn't know what our First Amendment, that is a guaranteed right.
00:31:06.000And then Tim Wall's paper, who's ended up being such a gift to the Republican Party.
00:31:39.000And I think when they were able to really work with tech companies, including Google, we don't even know what they're doing with Google and CIA's backdoor and how that is working.
00:31:50.000But when you actually saw the Twitter files, and thank God for Elon Musk, but you know that the Biden-Harris administration was working through these companies, I mean, literally within 48 hours, To silence Americans.
00:32:54.000Not only was there in the pandemic, but then the stupid idiots at the Screen Actors Guild Union, and I was one of those idiots on the union, but going for a strike after the pandemic just to destroy the average person on the crew and the average actor, it was beyond stupid.
00:33:11.000And then Disney making this woke crap to the point where my wife and I We got little kids.
00:33:17.000Both were under 10 a couple of years ago.
00:33:19.000Now, we had to watch the Disney shows before we let the kids watch it, just in case this woke crap that there isn't some character that is indoctrinating our kids.
00:34:12.000The podcast is something, and independent people like you, The Daily Wire, the reason why you guys were able to become a big business, successful business, because you weren't trying to tell people how to think.
00:34:23.000You were just providing another viewpoint that was rational, that was logical, and that was more aligned with their families.
00:34:30.000That's going to continue to grow, and if they want to be in business, they're going to have to come over to our side of the fence.
00:34:37.000Do you trust your internet service provider?
00:34:39.000Well, you probably shouldn't, because depending on where you live, ISPs may be required to keep logs of your online activity, just in case the government would love to take a peek.
00:34:52.000Well, the obvious solution is to get a VPN. The one I use is ExpressVPN.
00:34:56.000It's an app that reroutes my online traffic through encrypted servers, so my ISP can't get their hands on it, neither can data brokers or any other third parties.
00:35:03.000For this to work, of course, you actually have to trust your VPN. After all, you're just transferring trust from your ISP to your VPN provider.
00:35:26.000To be clear, it's not that they don't comply with law enforcement requests.
00:35:29.000They comply as much as they possibly can.
00:35:31.000But you can't hand over what you don't actually have.
00:35:33.000And ExpressVPN simply doesn't have any of their customers' activity logs thanks to a specially engineered server architecture that runs on volatile memory.
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00:36:05.000Do you think it's going to be easier for people who may be middle of the road or leaning conservative to actually start coming out of the woodwork in Hollywood?
00:36:12.000I mean, you and I know a bunch of people.
00:36:14.000I mean, I know a lot of people in Hollywood who definitely voted for Donald Trump.
00:36:17.000Definitely would not say openly that they voted for Donald Trump for exactly the reasons you say, that they'll lose work.
00:36:21.000These are working actors who, and many of them very, very famous, and are still terrified that if they ever betray their politics to the people around them, that somehow this will have massive career ramifications.
00:36:33.000Do you think that's going to get easier, or do you think that the system just continues to break because the people at the top can't let go?
00:36:39.000I think it's going to take another generation.
00:36:41.000It's just like when Moses took the tribe out to the desert.
00:36:46.000You're going to just have to get that slave mentality out of you.
00:36:50.000I think it's the same thing with the liberals and the Democrats.
00:36:53.000They're going to have to get that constrictive.
00:37:03.000We've all experienced it and we've seen it.
00:37:06.000They'll start yelling at you and it is, as you know, more than probably any American, the worst form of debate is just somebody shouting you down.
00:37:15.000They're not trying to beat you with ideas.
00:37:16.000They're not trying to dissuade you with something that could improve your foundational thinking.
00:37:24.000And we, as a society, cannot go down the road any further with trying to stop our liberties and our free speech to calm down the irrational.
00:37:37.000I mean, but it's gonna take people, like I'm starting a media company, and I can't believe how many people are joining in and are making this a real media company, because I wanna be a centrist.
00:37:47.000If you're a liberal, if you're a conservative, you are welcome, and we are not going to do anything by the party line.
00:37:54.000We're gonna do stuff that's rational, that's talent-based, but it's also American-based.
00:38:00.000That was such a pleasure to do your first animated show because it was about America.
00:38:08.000You weren't indoctrinating people, but the fact that you're saying good things about America to liberals and to the Democratic Party, it was as if you were saying something heretical to say something great about the country and our accomplishments.
00:38:22.000So the attack on Western civilization, which I think is a bigger issue, which is the Democrats make that gigantic mistake of wanting this one-world government, this elitist system where they have control.
00:38:35.000But they make the mistake of thinking it's going to be the American Democratic Party that's going to be in control of this one-world order, and it's going to be China.
00:38:42.000And that is a gigantic error on their part.
00:38:45.000And thankfully, I think this was a gigantic...
00:38:50.000It was a big fence to stop the further erosion of the American way of life and having Marxism come in disguised as this woke set of nice manners when it's just communism dressed up as social justice.
00:39:05.000So, obviously, you've been doing comedy for decades at this point.
00:39:09.000Has there ever been such a fraught time in comedy?
00:39:11.000I mean, you see people like Dave Chappelle getting shouted down, or you see Tony Hinchcliffe being made the centerpiece of the entire presidential campaign for the last week because he makes a bunch of Tony Hinchcliffe jokes.
00:39:23.000And listen, you can make the case, I've made the case myself, that, you know, maybe in the closing days of a campaign, you don't want to trot out an insult comedian to go after particular ethnic groups, you know, like at the very last moment of the campaign.
00:39:33.000It might not be like your chief, if you're like chief political consultant for the Trump campaign, you're not like, okay, you know, we got to make a closing argument.
00:41:31.000And Mort Sahl was, after the Warren Commission came out, he questioned, rightly so, the Warren Commission's findings.
00:41:40.000And because of that, that wasn't where the term conspiracy theorist originated, but it was the first time that the CIA used it as a roadmap to silence people who were going against the then-government narrative about the Warren Report and people questioning the Kennedy assassination.
00:41:58.000So that was a time where comedy got silenced.
00:42:03.000I remember Steve Martin talking years ago, like literally 40 years ago, about what happened after Watergate and after Vietnam.
00:42:14.000People just wanted to get silly and forget about everything.
00:42:17.000And I think after this time, after the pandemic, which was really, I mean, we're not going to really know the ramifications, what happened to the students who were locked down.
00:42:26.000And, you know, for the African American reading skills that took decades to get up to where they were on par with everyone else, and for that to collapse was very sad for educators.
00:42:38.000My mom was a school teacher for 30 years, a public school teacher.
00:42:42.000We don't know what's going to happen with it, but I do think that now there is a chance that That we'll be able to have some normalcy in comedy.
00:42:50.000And people are going to have to attack the power.
00:42:52.000I mean, we're going to have to see what the Republic's going to do.
00:42:54.000And then, I don't know if I have an act anymore.
00:42:56.000Because my whole act, the last couple of years, was just making fun of the wonderful material that was provided by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the Democrats.
00:43:04.000So, let's get to some of the stuff that you talk about in your book.
00:43:07.000You can do it, or I can't do an impression of you.
00:44:33.000We have the last place 49ers, the last place San Francisco Giants.
00:44:36.000So it was literally like a depression up there.
00:44:38.000So at the time, though, that kind of downtrodden liberalism created a very welcoming thing for comedians who were trying to do something different, as I was back in the early 80s, late 70s.
00:44:53.000And then we kind of came into something interesting, whereas there was an explosion of comedy.
00:45:30.000Everybody said, I got two hours of comedy material, you know?
00:45:32.000Who wants to hear two hours of comedy material?
00:45:35.000Either have five minutes to kill every time, everywhere you go, or you have nothing.
00:45:38.000So I spent the next eight months working on those five minutes, and then eight months after that, I was on David Letterman, then I got on HBO. So, I mean, David Spade, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, or maybe Chris Rock had more material, but we basically had 20 really good minutes.
00:46:01.000You have like one day you're completely unknown, the next day you're You know, buying milk in a grocery store and people are doing your bits.
00:46:10.000Ben, the Benster, Benarama, all right, Ben, buying milk.
00:46:14.000And then she's like, wow, I think they're doing me.
00:46:28.000The one great thing about being cancelled or whatever has happened to me, I got to go back and do what I started out doing, which I don't think I ever really finished, was really coming up with a really good stand-up, the craft of stand-up.
00:46:42.000That's why I never wanted to do it, because unless you're doing it full-time, I mean, you can't.
00:46:47.000I mean, Chris Rock was the one who talked me to go back into it.
00:47:09.000And he doesn't align with me politically, but we know good jokes when we hear them.
00:47:15.000And then I really freed me because the interesting thing is when they try to cancel you, It is a really interesting thing.
00:47:22.000I don't know how else to describe it, but when they do go after you, and they go after your pocketbook and your family, and you think you may never work again, it reminds me of what Alan Watts talks about, a great British philosopher.
00:47:37.000He said there was a Japanese pilot who was a kamikaze pilot that's crashing his plane.
00:48:00.000His wing got blown off and then he spun, spun, spun, spun and landed in the ocean and survived.
00:48:04.000And he went on to become a Zen Buddhist monk and to relay these stories and that idea of Zazen, he called it.
00:48:12.000So in a much, much, much smaller way, I did feel like when they try to cancel you and you survive, you do get emboldened and to go, well, what do I really want to do?
00:48:23.000And I'm not going to be fearful anymore.
00:48:25.000And so if I've helped people be slightly less fearful, if I was able to be a voice for people who didn't feel like they could critique Hollywood, you know, because I said, you know, earlier, I said, you know, when Hillary lost, I said, I haven't seen the Democrats just pissed off since we freed the slaves.
00:48:43.000And then, you know, when Hillary When Newsom wasn't, when they tried to get rid of him, when they tried to recall Newsom, and it was so pathetically sad because, like, here's a chance.
00:49:56.000Graham, you're going to have to deal with it.
00:49:58.000And he's one of the best writers ever.
00:50:00.000I mean, BAFTA winning best comedy writer.
00:50:02.000He is the best comedy writer in England.
00:50:04.000And so we're going to start shows here in Arizona.
00:50:08.000And I think we're going to do, and I think what's going to have to happen in the studios, independent producers are the ones who are going to be taking the risks and providing content for people that people are going to want to watch.
00:50:19.000Content that's for everybody that isn't trying to indoctrinate people with this woke nonsense.
00:50:27.000So that's it, you know, in a nutshell.
00:50:30.000And I will say that the stand-up tour has been really educational and fun because that's the truth.
00:50:36.000The audience will tell you the truth, what they laugh at.
00:50:38.000And it was nice to see this happen because honestly, Ben, traveling around the country, as I'm sure you have too, there was a stress level that I've never seen in Americans.
00:50:49.000I felt they were about ready to crack.
00:50:51.000I felt they were so worried and I feel a real sense of, I wouldn't say joy, I would say a sense of relief.
00:51:04.000And that's the kind of, when you try to scare people for years and try to make them feel bad, try to call them racist, white supremacist, try to make them disparage them and call them garbage and deplorable and that their women aren't intelligent or smart.
00:51:34.000Yeah, I mean, I think that it's going to take a little while in the wilderness.
00:51:36.000You're starting to see this battle play out now where the heads of the Democratic Party, who obviously have a stake in saying they did nothing wrong, are fighting some of the people who have been outside.
00:51:45.000And so it's almost a tripartite battle.
00:51:47.000You have sort of the establishment of the Democratic Party, which feels that it did a great job.
00:51:51.000And then they are split between the wokest and the people who kind of want to do the Carvillian reset, the sort of Democratic Leadership Council circa 1990 reset where they figure out what they did wrong.
00:52:00.000It's going to take a while for them to hash that out, especially because they don't have sort of a charismatic leader to fill in all the gaps for them.
00:52:08.000I think the answer on the Republican side, by the way, is that there is the possibility of Republicans and conservatives and everybody who's part of the Trump coalition thinking that the referendum wasn't About Trump, it was sort of a justification for everything Republicans have ever said.
00:52:22.000I think you see this usually in party politics, where Obama was a unique political figure.
00:52:26.000Everybody on the left sort of assumed that because he was popular, that meant everything they were doing was popular, and it turned out that wasn't true at all.
00:52:33.000And I think the right, you could see something pretty similar, where it turns out that Trump has a unique draw, he's a unique character in American life, and that that's not actually quite duplicable, that you can't just shove anybody else into that seat and then magically get the same sort of response from the American public.
00:52:45.000public, you're not going to get low propensity voters to show up for, you know, a J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio or whomever else.
00:52:51.000And that's going to be a new challenge.
00:52:52.000You're going to have to have somebody arrested 37 times or 37 convictions, felony, felony, felony New York City convictions by an impartial, democratically insane jury.
00:53:03.000And then you're going to have to have those seven convictions.
00:53:05.000And then you're going to have to have somebody who's almost murdered in public.
00:53:09.000And then that was that was the thing like why.
00:53:12.000What the Republicans really need to do is to focus in and do the job that they've been asked to do.
00:53:20.000The FBI, when they're asked at the congressional hearing, were there any FBI dressed up as Trump supporters inciting and inviting people in the Capitol?
00:53:31.000And he said, I'm not allowed to give out that information.
00:53:43.000He was one of the guys, the head of the FBI. He's one of the guys said, like, well, we don't know if he was really shot.
00:53:48.000It could have been a piece of strap now.
00:53:49.000It's like, why even make that crazy statement?
00:53:53.000So you really have these entrenched, and this guy was appointed by Trump.
00:53:58.000You really have an entrenched group of people who don't seem to have a grasp on what the average American wants, what the average American's life is like.
00:54:37.000If that increase, Ben, would have happened, that means the local school boards would have been irrelevant because then everything would have gone from the federal.
00:54:46.000And then you're not going to have states...
00:54:49.000You're not going to have the states being able to decide what their education is, what the school boards are going to decide, what the parents want to decide.
00:55:09.000What was potentially tipping, if they would have let in 11 million more people, if they were able to flood Florida, even Florida, and then Texas, and then Ohio, so that we wouldn't get a choice next time.
00:55:22.000We really were on a razor's edge tipping, and I do think that that was avoided, and avoided by the American people.
00:55:50.000If you look at anybody who's out there in the public square talking about conservative values and being able to back them up, it was, you started that.
00:55:59.000it great to see you the ben shapiro sunday special is produced by savannah morris and matt kem Associate Producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.