[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider.

For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.

“If we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider said.

Schneider, who is also a screenwriter and director, rose to prominence as a cast member and writer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his writing on the show.

In this episode, he reflected on our current political and cultural moment.

What really happened when Rob bumped into Robert De Niro at the SNL reunion? What is the role of comedy in an age of outrage? And how do we turn around the tribalism he sees gripping America?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Rob Schneider, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Rob Schneider:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. During COVID, it was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people. And one of my escape valves was two pillars that I clung to at that time: Joe Rogan and The Epoch Times.So every morning I wanted to know, what’s Joe Rogan saying? And what can I read in The Epoch Times? That was my escape valve from tyranny. 

And thank you for that because The Epoch Times is important, it is journalism, and it is a potentiality for what all journalists should strive for. Be it, tell the truth as best as you can. No one can be a hundred percent purely objective, but just tell the news and let us decide for ourselves. Don’t tell us what to think. And you guys do that, so thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:

Rob, you made a huge impression on me the other night. And apparently, you had talked about this earlier, and it was covered in the Daily Mail. You gave this anecdote, and the anecdote was your experience at a Saturday Night Live reunion, bumping into Robert De Niro. And I want to get you to reprise that here. And then I'll explain why.

Mr. Schneider:

He’s obviously like the heir apparent to Marlon Brando. He’s an incredible actor of great power and esteem and all this. However, I think that like a lot of people, I think there’s whatever’s going on in their life; you could decide to focus all of that, if you want to use the term negativity, anger, or what have you, in a particular avenue. And I think for some people, I think it has a name, and that’s President Donald J. Trump. 

So knowing that and seeing that, like a lot of people have, but also knowing that he’s a good man. I mean, I know him outside of that, and he was very helpful with the movie called Vaxxed to put it in the Tribeca Film Festival. And that wasn’t an easy thing to do. And the pressure that he received from that, which I don’t think he was used to. He’s just used to being, you know, this is a two-time Academy Award winner; everywhere he goes, I’m sure he gets a table at a restaurant pretty easily. 

But he got so much flack for that that he ended up pulling the film out of the film festival, which we who were involved with the movie Vaxxed totally understood. And the attention that that brought to us was a great advertisement for the film. At the end of the day, you know, as the old adage goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

When I saw him there, I instantly wanted to not have conflict. He was two rows in front of me, and I thought, well, that’s a person I don’t want to ruin his evening, because I’m sure he knows I’m a Trump supporter, and I don’t want to ruin mine either, so we'll just avoid it. I’m there to celebrate the 50 years of Saturday Night Live. I’m part of their history; they’re part of mine, and they were kind enough to include me in these festivities. 

We’re all there in our tuxedos, but then towards the end of the night, we get into a cramped area where we all have to walk on stage. It’s a very nice thing; they invite everybody for one final bow, as it were. Anyone who has ever been a cast member or anyone who has ever hosted the show—unfortunately, the show’s been on for 50 years, but fortunately, everybody in the audience was actually a cast member or host of the show—so we all make our way onto the stage, and I find myself being jostled. 

I’m right behind De Niro, and I, you know, finally, I’m trying to stay away, and I bump into him. He turns around and has that particular expression, which I think everybody knows. It’s just like, how can you support that schmuck? He gave me that look, and he was about to really go at me. And, you know, I just literally—this is an interesting thing—you can just choose to not have conflict. I just said, I love you. He gave me that look like, no. I touched him and said, no, I love you, man. Okay? I think it diffused that situation. 

You know, I’m not always going to be at my best, but at that moment, I was. That was what needed to happen. You know, with cancel culture, we’re not going to win. When I say we, I mean we as a society. We’re not going to get anywhere by just this battle. We’re going to have to find some common ground, and we’re going to have to have people who are willing to take responsibility for their own actions and how they’re willing to treat other people. At that moment, I was in a good place. I’m not always going to be in that good place, but it was what was needed at that time. I hope I can channel that more often.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, I mean, it was beautiful. You gave that anecdote at a fundraiser in Irvine that you were helping us out with. I thought it comports very well with our ethos at The Epoch Times, how we approach basically doing journalism. We’re always trying to reach people, basically, with ideas that, in many cases, they may not even, may not be ready for. And that’s very difficult in this day and age.

Mr. Schneider:

Especially the way the press is viewed now. I mean, look at today’s news. You wake up to the New York Times piece about, you know, Donald Trump having the royal Saudi prince, who’s, according to an intelligence report, said that he was responsible for the murder of a journalist, Khashoggi, and who actually was also working for Qatar, being paid by Qatar, which complicates it. But nevertheless, that’s a real question that should be asked. 

However, my question is, and they also asked about the business dealings of the Trump administration, the Trump family with the Royal Saudi family, and if they think that’s appropriate. These are all good questions, and whether good or bad, they’re questions that need to be asked by a free press. However, my comment is, why wasn’t that asked? Or why aren’t these same questions asked under the previous administration? And where is the objectivity for the press? You have to be able to ask difficult questions of every administration, and the administration, anybody in power must take that in. And so we do have a lack of belief and faith in today’s media and institutions in general.

Mr. Jekielek:

And, you know, case in point, actually, I saw Matt Orfalea. I don’t know if I might be butchering his name right now, but he has this habit of putting together these kind of incredible montages of media malfeasance, which I really appreciate him for. And today he published something earlier, which was basically how the media explained the whole Kyle Rittenhouse situation. Of course, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder. In fact, he had come to help people and basically defend. But the way he was portrayed in the media, I actually think of it as one of the most terrible examples of media malfeasance. 

And again, Orfalea, as he goes on X, just kind of laid to show exactly what people said. And here’s the problem, right? To this day, there are people who believe that it was unfair. I mean, the case is meticulously documented, and you can see what the reality was, but there’s a whole lot of people in society today that kind of believe that he got away with murder or something like this, right?

Mr. Schneider:

Don’t trust your eyes and ears; just trust what Big Brother says

Mr. Jekielek:

The media really made black white, and white black in that situation. I mean, this happens often, but this isn’t in a very extreme way where it really was the opposite of what was being portrayed, and it was kind of obviously opposite if you were to look at the video, you know, evidence and so forth. But the evidence doesn’t change the opinion because it’s tribal in nature. I'll just go on to say, like what Noam Chomsky, in his Manufacturing Consent, describes the mainstream media or media in general as a giant wrecking ball, just going through, just crushing and destroying things and moving forward. And it never stops. 

Also, more importantly, or as importantly, it never goes back to look at the wreckage in its wake. It just continues to move forward. And so you have this extreme form now, whereas the tribe is illogical because it has no empathy. We saw it in the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, where the assassin was somehow so wrapped up in this tribalism for his particular side that he just had no empathy. He cared more about the gun that was missing, that he was going to upset his grandfather by not being able to recover the gun, than he cared about the murder of this incredible young man, a young father and a young husband. 

And so there’s a complete lack of empathy on one side for anybody outside your particular tribe. And then there’s an insane amount, too much, I would say, pathological empathy for people in your tribe. I mean, the idea that, for somebody who is a criminal and someone who’s, you would have like, for someone who’s in the country illegally has been trafficked, people like this Garcia guy. And the idea that he is his father and he’s been stolen. It’s like, we need to look at things as best as we can. We need to have a press that is going to attempt, and it’s impossible to be completely objective, but they must try.

Mr. Schneider:

Truth seeking, right? 

Mr. Jekielek:

The genuine truth seeking with the knowledge that you can’t necessarily get all of it every time. And in fact, in some cases, it’s very hard to get it. But the question is, are you trying?

Mr. Schneider:

My friend had dinner with the editor-in-chief of The New York Times a few years back. And he said, is objectivity something that you’re concerned about? And his answer was, I believe it is my moral imperative to make sure that Donald Trump does not become president of the United States again. So what does that mean? And then it just kind of goes to show the difference, and you could see it in the headlines, the same situation of the former administration. the Biden administration, and the same situation, and the headlines are much more jarringly tribal in favor of the previous administration. That’s very telling of where we’re at now. 

I would say it is approaching what the former Soviet Union had. And that’s why I like my friend Elya Baskin, who was from the Soviet Union and knew what it was like. I don’t know why your country, why you guys would go and want that, but you are approaching it and that you can’t see it is communism, that that is what’s happening, that you can’t see that. It’s an incredible, horrible thing that you are approaching. 

And so what happened was that he would tell you that Noam Chomsky would tell you that the Soviet Union, people knew Pravda and TASS, the government mouthpieces. No one believed it. They knew it was just garbage, what the government wanted. And so where did they go for truth? Where did they find out what’s really happening in their society? And it was person to person. What did you hear? What do you know? And that’s exactly what happened. And I think exponentially, it happened during COVID.

When you knew you couldn’t believe The New York Times and The Washington Post anymore. And who did you know? You had to go. So you went to who’s saying what? And that’s where podcasts exploded. Because, well, Joe Rogan’s saying something. And I believe that more than I believe the New York Times. And when they colored, when CNN colored his face to make him look really sick. I mean, who, how come nobody got fired over that? When Sanjay Gupta went on Joe Rogan, he would not admit and wouldn’t give in. And to the fact that this actually happened. He just seemed slightly disappointed, which is not what needs to happen. If we’re going to have this system of just two political parties, we need two normal, sane political parties. 

But for the Democratic Party to not come out and admit that the Biden administration, in fact, did day one with Facebook, with Google, with Instagram, with the tech companies, censor Americans day one and within the first 24 hours of the Biden administration, that they don’t come out and say that that is egregious and that is government censorship and that is wrong. For not one Democratic senator or congressman to come out and admit that that’s wrong is a stunning indictment of where we’re at. Whereas, the tribal party system seems to be the only thing that’s important. And maintaining that and returning that to power is more important than any objectivity or truth or what’s best for society.

And I think that’s a dangerous place that’s setting up something approaching authoritarian dictatorship, libertarian dictatorship, or some version of a Chinese-style social credit system. It’s definitely an encroachment on that. And I think that Donald Trump, for better or worse, in all his piccadillos was a resounding rejection of wanting a continuation of a system that was just lying about everything. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, it’s interesting that you say there was this, you know, people didn’t, people understood that Pravda was, was, you know, not the truth. And I, I’ve always assumed that. And of course, you know, and I also realized the thing that to me, the biggest lesson of COVID in a way was kind of the opposite was that actually a lot of people do believe it. Yes. And I didn’t, cause, cause I generally, I at least think in many ways I was going to be a bit immune to that not everything but I’m always just have this natural skeptical sort of disposition. 

Mr. Schneider:

Right, well, the people do that’s the difference and Noam Chomsky talks about that is that that’s how much more insidious uh propaganda is in a free society because people do believe The New York Times. They’re more likely to believe The Chicago Tribune, New York Times, or Washington Post, and they'll take that as truth. Whereas I think COVID helped melt that, or at least got a lot of people to question it. And that was the breakdown in people who, you know, the 80 million Americans who said, we’re not taking that shot. That was a pressure that people were under— firing frontline workers and nurses and doctors who refuse to administer or refuse to take that shot. 

These are people who risked their lives during COVID. For them to be fired was a stunning indictment on that, on the Biden administration. And thankfully, those workers, a lot of them have been rehired, have been compensated. And, you know, if you don’t have a choice, that’s how I got into this attack. It was pretty basic. I mean, the last refuge of your own freedom is your own body, your body autonomy.

If the government can make you take any and inject something, an experimental gene therapy or anything into your body against your will, then the government is now able to do any form of atrocity. Once they break that barrier, there’s nothing they can’t do. So that was a delineating line between abject authoritarianism and tyranny. And the United States and enough people said, no, we’re not doing it. And that’s why I think that it collapsed. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So was there some specific moment? I mean, you’ve been a very successful comedian, actor, and now author. But there’s a number of people in Hollywood who think of you perhaps like Robert De Niro did. I was thinking of you that day. Maybe even many. I don’t know. But was there some... I mean, you had to make some decisions at some point.

Mr. Schneider:

Yes, you’re either with the Liberal Party, and you take Mark Ruffalo. He could say whatever he wants against Trump, and he'll still get work as an actor. But if you, if an actor like me says anything or even questions or dares to question the tribe of Democrats, that’s it. You’re out. You’re out of Hollywood.

Mr. Jekielek:

Did you know that before you started, you opened your big mouth?

Mr. Schneider:

Well, not to this extent. I mean, when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and, um, I tweeted, I haven’t seen the Democrats this angry since we freed the slaves. That was something that went everywhere. And then, they didn’t like that. I remember my old boss at Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, would say that the Democrats are more sensitive and they don’t have quite the sense of humor to laugh at themselves as Republicans. And I think he was right, but I didn’t take that advice. 

I will say that, objectively, I was naive. I believed that when I met people, parents, who knew that their kids were fine. And actually, as young children, they were actually meeting the markers or exceeding them. And then they got a series of shots that were required to go to school. And then the kids were never the same again. Never. 

This thing about autism, people don’t talk about severe autism. I’m talking about headbanging where they have to wear helmets, where they’re still in diapers at 18. It’s something you don’t see; the idea that they’re just these cute, you know, um, really eccentric children, that is not what I witnessed. What I saw was headbanging. I saw 19-year-old kids who had lifelong problems and, you know, were still in diapers with horrible gut issues and violent. Their parents, I chose to believe them, and I still believe them that their kids were fine and then all of a sudden were not fine. 

The idea that you can just go back and not know that and ignore it, I felt, basically, you had people close to you that this a family that had this happen. I met them; I saw them. So I got involved in this many, many years ago because what happened was the pharmaceutical industry actually works with Merck, GlaxoSmithKline. They have their publicists, and they have their people. and they literally write what they want for legislation and give it to the medical boards of different states, like the state of California, and then that goes right to the legislation. 

And here’s the thing about pharma: I mean, you take a look at that one drug, vaccines. It’s the only drug. It’s never evergreen. It never becomes generic. It’s the one drug, the only drug made where if there’s something wrong with it, you can’t sue. If you get injured by it, you can’t sue for damages. And it’s in a class of its own, almost like it’s sacrilegious.

Well, you can’t sue the company. You can sue them in a court of law, but you have to go to what they call a special magistrate. And then there’s no reporters allowed. And then it takes maybe 10 years for any sort of financial recoupment for these lifelong illnesses for families who have to have at least one parent stay home, and it’s lifelong. And then a lot of those get kicked out. 

But there’s been over $5 billion paid out by this system they call the Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System [VAERS], which goes into the special magistrate. So it is a system, and it was given out under the Reagan administration in 1986, called the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which Reagan did not want to sign, but didn’t feel comfortable with not signing and did. What the manufacturers of these drugs were supposed to do was report to Congress every six months and make sure that the safety standards were there, which they’ve never done. 

So you have a system of an incredible amount of wealth made by a small group of companies that are fleecing the American public. And if you go now to a statistic from 2013, and this is by the National Institutes of Health, 54 percent of American children suffer from at least one chronic illness, whether it’s asthma, childhood diabetes, childhood obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, or peanut allergies. These are something unheard of just a few short decades ago.

Mr. Jekielek:

This experience, right, of knowing, understanding something different than the grand narrative was, right? Is that what, I guess, you know, made you vocal?

Mr. Schneider:

Well, I mean, they asked me, I mean, the people asked me to testify on their behalf. And if you’re famous, you just, you know, more eyeballs go to you. And so I did. And that was it. Boom. I mean, that was it for me, starring in movies. And the idea of telling the truth in an age of authoritarianism, in an age of lies is a courageous act. And, you know, I’m not saying that I’m courageous. 

When I think of real courage, I think of just driving by the cemeteries in any major city of people who gave their, what Lincoln describes, the last full measure of devotion for this great land. And that is a sacrifice. I mean, the fact that I'll never make Deuce Bigelow IV, V, and VI, I think is fine. But it is, I mean, it’s a bummer. It does happen. And, you know, show business, wrong or right, they don’t want any controversy. You know, they don’t want you being mouthy or anything. And that makes sense. 

But I do think that at a certain point, if we’re going to have a society and if we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous. And, you know, this country still allows that. It is our First Amendment right. Does it make you free of consequences? No.  You just, you know, you can ask Jimmy Kimmel, who was temporarily fired. And you know you can ask people who speak up. I mean, it’s going to cost you, but the thing about it’s really depressing was I knew Charlton Heston. 

Now, Charlton Heston was a conservative and a gun rights advocate, and I thought that was, I thought the gun rights part was kind of crazy. Now I realize it’s not crazy; that’s the only thing that kept us out of tyranny, the fact that, you know, Americans have at least 400 million guns, at least. So, but I remember him being a really good, really good American, loving America. 

And I remember him, this is a guy who marched with Martin Luther King early, like 1961, before it was, you know, a cause celebre. I mean, with Marlon Brando. I mean, these guys realized where the country needed to go. So we needed to have equal rights. We needed to have a society that didn’t, you know, judge people based on the color of their skin. And he was there. And then years later, just rejected by the liberal intelligentsia because he just happened to be a conservative. And I think that’s shameful. I think that’s a rot in the soul of Hollywood. 

And I think today’s blacklisting of conservatives is the same thing. I think at its core, it is adding to its destruction, and I think we are seeing Hollywood completely dismantle itself. You will not see these studios—the Sony lot, the Fox lot, Warner Brothers lot—those places in five years will just be real estate. You will not have those stages anymore, and I think it’s their own decline. I think the Actors Guild didn’t help and the Writers Guild didn’t help after the pandemic by having a strike. I thought that was just completely irresponsible and stupid. 

And then people realize, hey, we‘ll find entertainment somewhere else. There’ll be more entertainment on Instagram. As a matter of fact, I think more people watch Instagram, and they’re like, do this. That’s funny. That, you know, or this. I don’t know which way it goes. That, you know, or this, I don’t know which way it goes. 

So I think you’re going to see, you’re seeing right now a rejection of Hollywood, and you’re seeing it. It’s an, you’re seeing an implosion of it. What will replace it? I don’t know. I mean, I think what replaced the news is individual people talking, like Joe Rogan, the biggest of those independent media and everybody else. I mean, when they talk about the press, the free press, the founding fathers, they don’t want to talk about media. No media existed. They meant just the idea that you could print something. I mean, a physical press that made a newspaper, that’s what they meant by it. It wasn’t like CBS News or ABC or any of that. 

And that, in essence, was what got out during the pandemic, during the squelching of voices, and you had individual people. What do you think? What do you say? And I think that’s continued. Theo Von has a bigger audience than The New York Times. He’s just a guy talking, a comedian on a mic. Joe Rogan, a comedian, a really amazing wrestler, and an expert on MMA. He’s the biggest. He’s our Walter Cronkite. How did that happen? 

Just like the legislation that we have, the senators and congressmen, they no longer write laws anymore. They’ve abdicated their lawmaking abilities, and they just would rather not do it and let the president rule by executive order because it’s safer for them. In the same way, the media now has abdicated their objectivity and their willingness to just tell news as it is. And they’re sucked into this tribalness, and that is a detriment. 

And that’s why, you know, this ever-shrinking CNN audience, the ever-shrinking New York Times audience, who is it for? Owned by a billionaire who doesn’t have the same laws as the average American, doesn’t pay taxes. So you have the very, very top not paying any taxes. They’re just borrowing money at very low interest rates on all their stock, and they live off that, very much like Getty. Same thing; he never just kept buying art and art and art, buying all this, never had to pay taxes. 

So who pays taxes? The donkeys, the middle class. Forty-two percent of Americans pay nothing, and then there’s the super-rich, and then there’s all of us in the middle. And how long is that going to last? How long is that going to last? How long are they going to continue to fleece these tax donkeys before people go,

Hey, I don’t want to play this game anymore. That’s an interesting one. I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that. But I would say it’s not going to be indefinite. Spanking your mind does come at a price when you step out and risk yourself. I mean, Oprah Winfrey will tell you that when she supported Obama, she knew that was going to cost her millions of dollars. But I do think there comes a time when you have to put your head above, out of the foxhole. I think you have to, your head above, uh, out of the foxhole. I think you have to—there’s a time for courage, and there’s a time when you know that your society is under attack, and that’s the thing.

You know, people use the term nationalism very loosely. Like now, he’s a nationalist. Well, there’s a necessity for nationalism if your nation is under attack. If it’s letting in 10 million people over the border, at least that—that’s an invasion. If your government is censoring journalists and outspoken people questioning the government policy, then you need to be a nationalist to stand up for your nation. The idea of nationalism, in my opinion, becomes dangerous when it expands its borders in the name of nationalism. Then I think that’s dangerous. But I think it was important to be a pro-American nationalist in the last election, for sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, you talk about this actually in your book a little bit—that people sometimes assume that you’re the character, the characters that you play. If you’re an actor and you’re prominent, a lot of people see you; they assume. And I think that I actually, to be perfectly honest, wasn’t a Deuce Bigelow fan.

Mr. Schneider:

I can understand that, if you accidentally watch it. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But I would have been—I love it. No, no, exactly. And no, but I mean, I had no idea, for starters, that you have such depth to you.

Mr. Schneider:

I do.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because, you know, I didn’t sit down and think about it either, right? But I mean, it’s just interesting how we assume comedy is. 

Mr. Schneider:

I find comedians to be pretty smart, but the idea is not to appear smarter than everybody else. Here’s what you never hear: let’s go see that comedian this weekend. He’s really smart. You know, is he funny or not? I mean, but you can use comedy to subvert people to your point of view. When I can say, you know, to an audience during the pandemic, like, hey, this is a scary time because, you know, the government’s telling you what’s happening.

Like, oh no, there’s another announcement here. This guy’s parachute didn’t open, and he died of COVID. People are going to see, and hopefully they'll laugh. And if you can laugh at it, that is when authoritarianism collapses, when it’s no longer frightening to people. COVID got to the point where you could laugh at it. 

When Governor Gavin Newsom said, mask up between bites, if you didn’t laugh at that or see the ridiculousness of it, then you’re captured, and there’s nothing I can say to help you. And there’s going to be a large section of society that’s going to be captured by that. You saw that that was garbage, and enough Americans—we don’t need all Americans to get healthy. There are some who are not going to do it. I don’t care, but we need enough of them to get healthy so that we don’t collapse as a nation. Also, we need enough to realize the government’s lying to us to make some changes. 

I say this in my stand-up act, God is a terrible casting agent. He doesn’t, but if you look at King David, he’s a murderer, an adulterer, a man who coveted another man’s wife. But God said, that’s my guy. That’s who I want. And so you can go down the line. And, like, truthfully, if we’re going to get—we’re not China. In China, they give you one party. They tell you who to vote for; that’s it. We’re America; we got freedom. We have two parties. Can we at least vote for the other party, you know, keep the other one in check? 

And so there were enough people who said they had had enough of it, and if you go back to the founding of our great nation, we didn’t get a hundred percent of the colonists’ support. Basically a third—no, I don’t think more than five percent ever showed up on the battle line with Washington, and his biggest problem really wasn’t the Germans who were fighting, you know, the mercenary Germans that were fighting for the British. His problem was keeping the colonist farmers, turkey hunters, to keep them there. And I don’t think he ever had more than five percent—three to five percent. 

So you have thirty percent who were roughly with the revolution, you have thirty percent who were loyalists to the crown in England, and then you had a third that were ambivalent. But a third—at the height, we never had more than a third. A third was enough to defeat the greatest superpower the world had ever known up until that point. Now, that is astounding. And so roughly we had a third of Americans who called bullshit on COVID and said we’re not going along with it.

That was enough to make this whole thing collapse. That was enough to get people, you know, like I would perform and travel around America, and, you know, certain states were open, certain states were closed. Like in California, you know, Gavin Newsom would close churches but kept strip clubs open, which I appreciated. And he kept the liquor stores and the weed stores open. It’s like, what? And then he closed private businesses. He said, like, if you had more than a thousand people performing, then they had to bring their vaccine cards.

So I said, okay, just sell 999 tickets. I’m not gonna force anybody to do anything. And so it’s like Bruce Springsteen’s new movie. I‘d love to go see it, but I’m not vaccinated. On Broadway, you couldn’t go see Bruce Springsteen, who’s a great guy and really an amazing American musician whom I’ll never not like. I'll always like him. However, I didn’t go see his show on Broadway because you had to be vaccinated. You had to have your vaccine card. That is a form of coercion. I mean, you got to go back to like, that’s something out of the 1940s with the Japanese internment. An American citizen, all of a sudden, you weren’t.

So we always have to be historically aware that you’re an American citizen until you’re not because these Japanese people had everything taken away from them, and they were thrown into camps. These were American citizens. So that’s something we need to be aware of. And I think, you know, under COVID, we were able to see your business, your small business, your restaurant, shut, shuttered. Your ability to make money, your ability to take care of your family was stopped. Yes, they did go up and print money and all this stuff, but at the same time, it was at the taxpayers’ expense, devaluing all of our money.

So where do we go from here? What’s next? Enough Americans are awake and aware of the potential for this country to become authoritarian. And I think that that’s something they should be aware of. I mean, while I support the deportation of people who have committed crimes over here illegally, there are people here who are illegal, who are working, who are part of the economy. And I think there needs to be, if you’ve been here for five years, seven years working a job, there needs to be some accommodation made for you. 

I mean, taking away somebody’s nanny is not something that Americans want or like. And I think that even the president mentioned that months ago, and I hope that while I abhor what ICE is being attacked, these are just government people, they’re doing their job. I also think we have to be aware of what’s actually happening in society, and that’s not a popular decision. I was booed for saying that. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, the big issue right people have is when you have people that are participating in the system and not making a lot of money and paying their taxes, basically having a large population that’s outside the system making, you know, less and needing the, you know, employers needing to pay less. That drives everything down. 

Mr. Schneider:

That is not good for our economy, and where’s our economy going to go? I mean, the replacement of workers now with robotics, with AI, I mean, okay, that’s going to happen. But who’s going to be able to afford to buy those products? You know, this is made in China. There’s 150 million workers who know how to make incredible products that, okay, well, if we don’t have them made in America, who’s going to buy the Apple phone? And are we going to head towards, you know, what most of humanity has been, was the peak of, I think, the peak of American power worldwide. 

And also, you know, you’re also dealing with the fact that, you know, Europe was destroyed, and Germany was rebuilding by the Marshall Plan and Japan was rebuilding by the Marshall Plan. And you had about 55 percent unionization, over 50 percent in 1955. So you had a real working class, and literally half of Americans were really kicking butt and participating in the system at a high level. And then you see now both parents have to work, and you’re seeing a tougher America, a less prosperous America.

You drive through, like I did through West Texas, and you see town after town after town of shuttered businesses, and these places are struggling. Now, AI coming in, is that going to give enough jobs for people? We need to, we discuss, we at some point in America decided to stop making stuff, stop being some sort of manufacturing base. And those jobs were gone. But what replaced it? We can’t just be a financial system, or we also can’t just be a system that takes care of sick people.

The healthcare jobs are very plentiful because we have a population that’s very sick. So, I mean, where are we going? If we don’t get enough Americans healthy, it doesn’t matter Democrat or Republican, we will collapse. Our healthcare system is at a breaking point. If we continue to go in the direction we’re going, in 10 years, I believe we'll be unsustainable. And you just have to look at the numbers. 

Robert Kennedy, a very good man, talks about that they want to give Ozempic as a way for every American. Well, it’s $1500. So if you give it to every person who is obese, and unfortunately it’s around 40 percent in America, it’s a trillion dollars. We can’t afford to do that. So how are we going to break the system? We have to get just the 30 percent of Americans that supported the revolution. 

We need to get 30 percent of Americans at least to get as healthy as possible and to not become part of the medical industrial complex of illness of just treating symptoms. If we don’t do that, then it doesn’t matter who you vote for, we’re just going to have to continue to print money and it’s going to be completely siphoned off to the medical industrial complex and also to insurance. 

Mr. Jekielek:

So that’s, okay, that’s super interesting because I know that you know free speech has been a center point of your let’s say advocacy right um and uh you know I’ve explored that extensively on this show and but for you it’s like it’s like you’re making a point of saying I need to help Americans 30 percent of Americans figure out those basic health realities, health care, as opposed to medical care, or disease care, as some guests have said. How do you think it’s going? 

Mr. Schneider:

We’re in a really tough place because Congress can’t legislate now. Because unless it’s a money bill, you need 60 senators to go along with it. You’re not going to get 60 senators to vote for anything. So what HHS [Dept. of Health and Human Services] is doing is the only thing they can do. They can cajole these giant food conglomerates to stop making stuff making people sick. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And they’re coming, they’re going to be coming out with the new food guidelines I remember Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s to the HHS charity was just talking about that so that seems, that seems like a very positive... 

Mr. Schneider:

If you go by the food pyramid, you are going to be obese. We’ve been lied to since the early 70s. It’s easy to do the Edward Bernays, who was the godfather of propaganda and wrote the book on it. And was able to figure out how to manipulate the public into doing things against their best interest by appealing to their desires as opposed to what is good for them. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But he said it was for the good of society 

Mr. Schneider:

He believed capitalism required consumerism that was from a quiet consumer; you just keep him buying stuff, and in the capitalist society, they'll be happy, and he didn’t mean that in—I mean, he genuinely believed that. However, the manipulation by approaching things through people’s desires is exactly what’s happening in our political sphere. We are appealing to people’s fears and their desires more than we’re appealing to their logic of what’s best for them. 

If you look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Roosevelt really believed that an informed populace, that the American people are good people, and if they just get unfiltered, correct information, they’re going to make the right choice. And I believe him exactly. And yet what we’ve got now is our political leaders don’t really believe that. They feel like they have to give them tailored information so that they’re going to do what they want or do what—his name—and said he could describe people and citizens as the bewildered herd.

Our leaders see us as cattle, a bewildered herd, not a smart herd; not a smart herd of cattle they’re trying to figure out, but a bewildered, confused, not knowing what’s happening, scared. And that’s how we are treated, and, you know, spoon-fed information. What I believe is you need to be honest with the American population. You need to be honest with the American population. You need to be an American citizen. 

You got to tell them what’s really happening. This cannot continue. We can’t stay at $37 trillion in debt. Either we’re going to blow up the system, which Dr. David Martin talks about how they’re just going to zap the system and blame China, Iran, Russia, or somebody, and just start over, which is going to cause mayhem. 

Who knows what that’s going to be like for a long period of time? We cannot continue to just print money forever and just pass the debt on to our great-grandchildren. That’s an unsustainable system to continue to have our population unhealthy. I mean, the Chinese must love it. Their greatest enemy, the biggest superpower the world has ever known, the United States of America, now has a sick population. 

We had more people, a higher percentage of people die in America of COVID because they were unhealthy and overweight than any other country in the world, and if that’s not a wake-up call, if people don’t come to their senses and take personal responsibility—and that’s what needs to happen—we must take personal responsibility for our own bodies, for our own freedom. We must be courageous about that or we’re not going to continue. 

That’s when I went to Berkeley, where there was a riot last week, and I was supposed to go with Charlie Kirk. I asked him over the summer, I said, let’s do another university. It was so fun, you know? And it was fun because you had people challenging us. To be a vibrant society, we must be able to be challenged. We’ve got to challenge ourselves. And as the great Andrew Doyle says, we must challenge our certainties. We must, because we can’t have a firm foundational belief system that’s unchallenged; then it'll be static. I mean, to continue to be creative, to innovate, to continue to be a vibrant culture, we must allow these challenges. 

So when I said, Charlie, let’s go to the craziest place, and he said, let’s go to Berkeley. So we went. I mean, he was murdered in front of his children, and I’m not quite sure how to filter that. There seems to be such a dis-ease in our culture and a lack of the most basic human dignity, compassion for this man. What happened after exposed so much ugliness in our culture that I don’t think it’s always been there. I think we’re at a point where somehow that is accepted by a large group of the populace. 

So I went alone after his murder and I went with his mentor, Frank Turek. There was a group of people at Berkeley who rioted outside and set off tear gas and devices that sounded like gunfire, threw things, and spit on people. The police and the University of California, Berkeley, to their great shame, did not prevent those people from interfering. I include the Berkeley police in that. They did not allow a corridor to get everybody in there. And that’s very shameful because in 1964 that was the free speech movement at universities. And it wasn’t for just one side; it was for all sides. So for them to fall so deeply off that precipice and to fall into an abyss of censorship is shameful and unfortunate. 

But it exposes where we’re at, at least. And I think I'd rather have it out in the open. That’s why free speech is so important. The idea of censoring—I mean, the Democrats, you know, during the election, Tim Walz said, you know, free speech doesn’t include hate speech. Okay, well, then who gets to decide what hate speech is? And then the government’s always going to decide hate speech or limit speech that helps and supports what the government is trying to accomplish, which is to squelch dissent of people who are not going along with their policies, Democrat or Republican. It’s the same. So it was disappointing. But at the same time, I was buoyed and encouraged by the students, Turning Point USA students at the Berkeley chapter who showed up over a thousand.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, to come kind of full circle here in our conversation, the thing that I’ve been discussing about Charlie Kirk’s murder and the whole situation is that he personified this kind of person who would try to reach out with love even to people that clearly disagreed. It didn’t mean he would agree. It didn’t mean he would validate. But he had this particular approach of not treating that other person as an enemy, but just someone that was perhaps mistaken. And it reminds me of, you know, again, this anecdote you have with Robert De Niro, how to approach things. 

When you have extremes, you know, there’s this concept, the principle of mutual inhibition and mutual generation, and mutual inhibition; you have one extreme breeds another extreme. We’re seeing a lot of this kind of thing in society. I wonder if the only way is through it, because I believe as you do that most people are actually good and there’s a lot more good than evil or bad out there, it’s just that you can kind of forget that and you can kind of imagine that it’s not like that. 

And you can forget that the person who’s, you know, furious right now about something or got caught up in some sort of social contagion or whatever is actually probably, in most cases, sometimes they might be a really bad person, but in most cases they’re not; they’re just kind of mistaken. And I agree there’s a humanity there we need to appeal to. And it’s just like when you’re driving, but you did, like you, my point is your example is you did it, like it worked.

Mr. Schneider:

It was instinctive at that moment and I was at a place in my life, and I really, I think you have to come from, I mean, it has to be what does this person need right now? And at that moment that person needed some love and some reassurance and humanity. 

You know, you’re driving in your car, it’s an interesting thing that happens sometimes. No, you want to merge, you know, there’s a big line of guys, they won’t let you in. It’s like just because they just see the blinker and a guy, but if you put your hand out, people realize something. Oh, that’s right, there’s a human being inside there. 

And so sometimes in our worst moments we must remember there’s a human being inside there being treated with dignity by the very virtue of them being human. And that is something we must never forget. Or all sorts of depravity can fall upon our society. 

And whereas, you know, there’s always going to be the potential for abuse, there’s always going to be the potential for a society to take these drastic measures, whether it’s during COVID and the closing of businesses and churches, or whether it’s the Japanese internment, or, you know, whether it’s the drinking fountains, or the National Guard having to come out to let this one black student attend the University of Alabama. There’s always going to be that potentiality. 

But in this great country, it is an amazing experiment in freedom, which is unique in world history. Like the United States and our First Amendment, whereas if you take a look at the French and the difference between the French and the rights of man and the citizen, which I think is 1787. And then by 1791, it was over. It went back to cutting off people’s heads again.

Whereas, the American Revolution is very particular and very special because we didn’t just abolish everything that happened before. We kept the property rights. We kept basically all the good stuff about England. And that’s an incredible system here. It is not an accident that the United States, you know, people all over the world look to our free speech as a beacon for freedom. People look to this. 

So it is not just important for the United States, but in all its imperfections, it will always have the potentiality to do something. But because of that free speech, which I love, they put that before guns. They could have easily put guns first, but they realized, specifically George Washington, that there was something way more important than guns: the weapon of our words to enshrine and continue our freedom to question our government without the government being able to imprison you or murder you. 

Mr. Jekielek:

But even deeper than words, you know, freedom of your soul, right? The freedom of conscience. I mean, that’s me embellishing a tiny bit here.

Mr. Schneider:

Yes, because freedom works both ways: freedom of speech. Like the other day when I was at the University of California, Berkeley, the thing about freedom of speech is it works, it’s bookended. It’s not only the ability for someone to speak their mind, it’s also the freedom for someone to listen to it, for someone to hear that. And they can take that information and that speech, and then they can interpret that how they want. And that’s why hearing bad ideas is just as important as hearing good ideas. Because then you can decide, I don’t want that. 

And the idea that the government’s going to be the citizen’s nanny to protect them from some sort of speech that could endanger them. I think that’s something that is abhorrent and something that goes against what Franklin Roosevelt thought of Americans. These are good people. Give them the information, and they’re going to make the right choice, always. And Americans are really good people. And yes, we could be inflamed, and we could be tribal, but we can also meet people in the middle, and we can move away from that tribalness. 

And in that moment with Robert De Niro, it was just a simple gesture of saying, of appealing to somebody and saying, look, whatever you’re feeling about it is not going to interfere. And I’m not going to feel that way about you. I love you. And that’s powerful. And I think at the end of the day, if we can really take that Christian ethic of showing that light, it will always, it'll always overpower darkness. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Rob Schneider, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Schneider:

Thank you, Jan. Thanks for having me.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.