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June 19, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:07
RICHARD DREYFUSS' AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep603
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Coming up, a special episode, an in-depth conversation with the legendary actor Richard Dreyfus.
You might remember him from, wow, Jaws, Mr. Holland's Opus, Take Out, Stand By Me, The Goodbye Girl, to name a few.
In recent years, he's become a trenchant critic of woke propaganda and woke requirements in Hollywood.
He's also an advocate for teaching civics and the principles of the American founding.
So, meet Richard Dreyfuss as you've never seen him before.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please hit the subscribe button.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast, well, for a special episode, the legendary actor Richard Dreyfuss.
He's been in more movies than I can count, and great ones.
Jaws, Mr. Holland's Opus, Take Out, Stand By Me, The Goodbye Girl.
But we're actually not going to be talking about movies today so much as we're going to talk about the Constitution and America and civics education.
And this has been something that Richard Dreyfuss has really been focusing on now for a number of years.
He has a marvelous new book that I'm glad to say I just read.
It's called One Thought Scares Me.
It's beautifully written and I will talk about a bunch of things from the book.
By the way, you can follow Richard Dreyfuss on Twitter, at Richard Dreyfuss.
Also, the website, thedreyfussinitiative.org.
Richard, what an honor, what a pleasure.
Thank you for joining me.
This is a really interesting subject, but let's begin by talking a little bit about how you, a guy who grew up in Brooklyn, you made your career as an actor in movies, and you won an Academy Award, and then you decided...
Well, I guess now more than a decade ago, we have a problem as a country, and I want to focus on that problem.
But what led you to such a sort of a shift in your focus?
I lead a blessed life.
I have been able to focus on...
Only those things that I am passionate about.
And I've always...
I've come from a very, very political family and the politics of my family have been really the driving force behind whoever it is that I am.
My... My great aunt, her name was Helsia Helfman, and she participated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881.
So whenever I've been asked, where do you get all this from?
I Because great aunt popped the czar in 1881.
And it's a showstopper.
You know, it's one of those things that no one's going to touch.
And most people wouldn't be talking about it or boasting about it, but here you are.
But talk about how that tradition continued.
I mean, you grew up in a left-wing family.
You come out of a union tradition.
You say that you not only were your parents Democrats and on the left, but you knew a lot of people who were communists.
You knew people who were socialists.
That was the political milieu.
That's just my immediate family.
Yes. Everyone who lived on my block was either a communist or a socialist.
And before the Second World War, my father was the leader of a Jewish gang in Brooklyn who I basically had to fight all the members of all the cultural enemies that they had because my grandfather,
my father's father, announced to him, my dad, Be prepared to take over the candy stroller because I'm going to be dead in two weeks.
And so...
After he got over that first shock, he did in fact die two weeks later because it was all too much for him.
And he had been an illegal immigrant.
He had escorted the family to America and then he was turned away because he had bad eyesight.
And so, on Ellis Island, they said, and you are not coming in.
And he had to go back and then sneak back in.
And so he was...
As soon as it began to be discussed as illegal immigrant, that was just at the time that that phrase became popular or unpopular, depending upon how you look at it.
And...
So, I inherited my politics from my great-aunt, Elsie Helfman.
The name of the group was the Narodnaya Volna, or the Narodniki, and she was as proud as punch that she had Participated in the death of the Tsar.
And this was in 1881, I'm pretty sure.
And her niece, Elsie Hoffman, And that's some Irish clerk on Ellis Island said, what's your name?
And she said, Elsie Helfman.
And he said, no, no, it's too much.
And so he changed her name right there to Elsie Helfman.
And so she was one of the fabled people whose name was changed and her history was changed by some guy that didn't know her and didn't even ask.
But Helcia...
It was an obvious thing for Elsie.
Yeah. Richard, let's take a pause.
We'll be back in just a moment and continue with Richard Dreyfuss.
And his murderous aunt.
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I'm back with actor Richard Dreyfuss.
We're talking about his family and really Richard Dreyfuss's America, which is the subject of this special episode.
Richard, talk about the America that you grew up in, because I think one of the background themes that you write about and that's motivating you is that you grew up in an America in which things seemed to be going right.
It seems that you grew up in an America where there was opportunity and ladders of opportunity for people to come up.
You could start out at the bottom.
You lived in an America that was confident and patriotic and proud of itself.
An America that didn't say we made no mistakes, but that were, as you put it in the book very eloquently, a work in progress.
We're getting better because we're living up more and more to the original ideals on which they're founded.
Your parents' generation was the greatest generation, the people who went through the Depression and World War II. I'm assuming that the America you grew up in was the America of the 1950s and then the early 60s.
Talk a little bit about that America, because for a lot of people, that America has now passed.
But talk about that moment, because I want to contrast it with the America we live in now.
Oh boy. Yes.
The era that I grew up in was what...
There was a book called The Reluctant Decade.
And it was the only decade that was 15 years old.
And the...
We were proud of ourselves and proud...
That we had actually accomplished more in that 15-year decade than any other decade in our history, except perhaps the first.
My aunt...
My aunt...
Popped the Tsar.
And then the Okrana, the Russian secret police, immediately rounded up all the people involved and hung them.
They knew who it was, they knew where they were, and they killed them all.
And they didn't kill Helsia Helfman because no one, even the Okrana, did not hang pregnant women.
And so she was allowed out.
And how do I put this?
My grandfather opened a candy store in Brooklyn, and then he was allowed citizenship.
He was allowed to become a citizen and allowed to vote and to involve himself in this new heaven on earth.
And that's what it was.
To be invited to be an American citizen was part of a deal.
And that deal was That the rest of the world had completely overlooked and forgotten that there was a resource which was the public,
the people and no one gave it any credential and the people of the left did and so By the time you were out of short pants, you were already halfway to being an American.
That's because what America offered, no one had ever offered in 5,000 years of citizenship, of being an American.
And you cannot underestimate the power of that offer.
You come here...
And you can be someone with more education than any other public society.
And no one had ever thought to give the public of any country Any advantage, because there was obviously nothing to give them.
And the job of the public and the job of the monarch was a complete turnaround.
The job of the monarch was to receive public applause.
And to make sure that he and his family lived in luxury.
But to offer that same luxury to anyone that was not noble, that was the silliest idea they had ever heard.
And so then...
Then was the invention of the theory of enlightenment.
And the enlightenment theory said, basically, that all men would receive the blessings of the public advantage.
If you could be an active public citizen And really learn what that was.
Then you had as great a shot at being a great American than the highest monarch and the highest king or prince or the members of any group such as someone who had done the king A great,
great favor, even though it had happened so long ago that most people had forgotten it.
And they not only received that gift, But their ancestors received it, and everyone got it, and their families got it.
And meanwhile, the people who fed them and clothed them received, I think it's called in the dictionary, nada, zip.
Nada, zip. Let's take a pause when we come back more with Richard Dreyfuss.
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I'm back with Richard Dreyfus.
We're talking about civics and America and an opportunity.
The website is thedreyfusinitiative.org.
You can follow him at Twitter, at Richard Dreyfus.
Let me summarize, Richard, what I think you're saying, and that is that, you know, one of the marvels of America is that it is a country based upon we the people.
It's based upon the idea that the people are given the privileges that were historically limited to aristocrats and to monarchs.
And that not only do people have the chance to better themselves in America, but they also have the chance to get smart.
In other words, to learn.
This is what you mean when you use the term enlightenment.
You're talking about the idea that this enlightenment, this historical enlightenment that was at one point limited, I think, to philosophers and scientists and the French philosophes, Is now through education available to anybody who's willing to open a book, has a good teacher, is willing to learn, and this mass education is an education not just for living a good life, but also becoming an active and participatory citizen.
Is that a correct summary of what you've been saying?
And talk a little bit more about the educational component of that.
Okay, I'll add one thing to what you described, and that is that becoming a citizen meant spreading the power of the monarch through all the different classes,
and the monarch's power was reduced to zero, and his aristocratic supporters Got no advantage, but you could attain that same knowledge and actively use it by spreading the power of the monarch through all of the classes that came to America.
We invited the poor.
We invited everyone who had no education.
And in those days, no education was not an accident.
It was a purposeful move on the part of the founders of the country.
And the difference between that and that which had gone before was the difference between night and day.
If you knew how, if it was discovered that you knew how to read, they lashed you.
If you were discovered to have the talent to write, they lashed you. And when they discovered that of all things he had the talent to do sums and add and subtract arithmetic, they chopped off your nose.
nose.
The chopping off of a nose was the oldest The oldest punishment known to mankind, it was discovered before the pharaonic era of Egypt, and it was used throughout any kind of punishment.
And so there were different...
How do I put this? There were different occupations than there are today.
There were the people who overheard and then reported that there were these people who knew how to read and write and do sums, and there were people who developed these talents and reported them.
And the people who reported them were paid.
And, you know, if you didn't get rewarded for that, you know, sooner or later you'd have to pay for that, for that little disadvantage.
And... And there's one other thing, and we use this phrase so often that we've forgotten what it means.
And that's the phrase, the word opportunity.
We actually said to the public, That if you used your talent to write or add or subtract or do things that were good for the health of the country,
you could win an enormous step forward for the public and There were many, many, many people whose attitudes and ethics were such that they got rewarded also so that we offered the opportunity to have opportunity.
And that...
That was a new, new thing.
And a contrast, isn't it, with the rest of the world for most of history.
You give a small vignette, an anecdote in your book where you talk about how they recruited people for the British Navy.
You know, this is the Grand British Navy.
You go, well, they just walk into places like bars and restaurants and grab people and then stick them on a ship and they were away from their family for three years and the underlying assumption was that the king owns you.
You're sort of the property of the king.
Your labor is at the disposal of the king.
Well, they need you on the high seas right now, so you're going to be back three years from now.
And the point is, this was normal.
And yet America was founded, wasn't it, in opposition to these kinds of ideas.
Let's take a short break.
When we come back, more about all this with Richard Dreyfuss.
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I'm back with actor Richard Dreyfus.
We're talking about America and the idea of opportunity, but I want to zoom into the topic of civics education because I think the theme of your book, Richard, is, hey, we have this great country that's based on noble ideals, ideals that were beautifully put together and not just put together in the abstract.
They produced a flourishing, successful, powerful, exemplary society, and our only job was to make sure that we transmit these ideals to the next generation and the generation after that.
And you say that over the last 50 years, we have stopped doing that.
Describe what you're talking about.
What is it that we stopped doing?
And then we can talk about why that happened.
We believed that if you educated the lowest of the low, the people without any opportunity, the people who had never learned anything, including how to write their own name, if you taught people how to do those things, then they were off to the races.
And they were given the quality of dissent and liberty and freedom.
These were not just the phrases that families used.
These were people who competed with one another For the privilege and opportunity of learning.
And the more you learned, the more you knew.
And the more you knew, the more subject to the capacity of learning everything that's in your ever-expanding brain.
In the old days, if you had an idea to move, and you had an idea that needed the space of bearing cattle or serving in different capacities, you had to ask permission to leave.
And most of the time, they were told, no, you can't.
And you belong to me.
And so, but that didn't sit well with the people who ran the country, who inherited a truly an imprisonment.
And they were imprisoned By their own minds.
Because their minds were kept as empty as possible.
And so...
But once you learned how to read and write and add and subtract and multiply, then your brain got a little bigger.
And then your brain got a little bigger than that.
And then you had an idea about having such a...
Explosive idea.
And you went to your boss, your owner, and you said, I have this great idea, but it can't be done here in New Hampshire.
It has to be done where there's room.
And most of the time, they were told no.
And at that point, they were also...
They made the decision...
that they didn't care what the guy said yes or no It wasn't up to them.
It was up to the person making that decision.
The public.
And that's why the United States, or call it America, was the story of people who first learned to ignore what is wittily called their public.
And they acted on it.
They left. And when they left, they didn't come back.
It wasn't necessary to come back.
And so my aunt and my grandmother both came up with ideas that required them to leave.
And they did.
And that was one of the revolutions within the revolution.
We call it era, the era, the revolutionary era.
But what does that really mean?
It means that the foundational ideas of America changed overnight, like that.
And the ideas were that you need not ask permission for movement, for growing up and older.
You were not called upon to be an active citizen of this new country.
A new country deserves to have new ideas.
And one of the new ideas of the revolutionary era that began the United States of America was the hopefully happy and gay decision that they didn't care what their lord and master was.
They were leaving anyway.
Bye! And I hope you've trained people to take my place because I'm leaving and I'm not going to teach anything to anybody.
And so that is one part of why we call that time the time of the revolution.
It's It's the most well thought out and the appropriate amount of time to give fair warning that America was changing the rules without asking permission.
And they did that.
So first they had to win their freedom from the British Empire, and to everyone's surprise, they did.
And then they set themselves up as an equal nation among nations.
And that was a rouser, let me tell you.
Because there was not one government on the face of this planet that agreed with these people.
And they were all going to bed at night, hopefully praying for the failure of these new ideas.
And we said to them, We will teach you for free anything you want to learn, and at the end of that supposed locked-in time,
you will learn everything necessary to run the country, not just be a member of society.
But to run this country, we created resource pools from which we could take government workers and pianists and all of the other occupations that go into running a country And working from the most splendid reward.
And imagine if the guy, if an immigrant had a natural talent for painting or for pottery or for dance, they were told Shut up and go back to the fields.
And we said, no.
Let's take a pause, Richard.
When we come back, more with Richard Dreyfuss.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with actor Richard Dreyfuss.
We're talking about America and the idea of a hopeful America that offers to its citizens what other countries never did.
Richard, I came to that America in the 1970s, dreaming the American dream, expecting and looking forward to and actually having benefited from that America that you've been outlining.
And yet, you say in your book, One thought scares me.
You say that, look, somehow we, and I want to talk about that, we lost confidence in this America, stopped believing in this opportunity, came to see the founders as bad guys or bad guys.
Focus on the evils of America.
Look at all the stuff that happened through American history, the sins of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and all the rest of it.
And we stopped teaching the America that you're describing on this podcast.
How did that change come up?
Well, when did the change come about and why?
Okay. Okay.
It started by the generation that I call the James Dean generation.
They were the people who were too young to help their fathers in World War II and too old to take acid with me.
They were not of the drug culture and So you were learning the penultimate mixed message.
And when you were growing up in the late 40s and early 50s, you got one little item in your kit bag, in your Christmas bag, That was totally unexpected and had incredible power.
And that was, we gave an open brain, a brain that literally enlarged by itself, And it enlarged it because we gave them basically free education.
And they didn't have to pay for it in any direct or indirect way.
And then when they tried to take advantage of it, they found that they could.
They found...
That this kit bag included the right to be as smart as you possibly could.
To be as smart as you could meant this.
There are things that occur to the brains of a man born as a field hand and were They were turned by magic into the citizenship of the monarch.
You weren't equal to the monarch, but you, in mass, were, in fact, equal to the monarch.
So that the classes that made up everyone beneath the The aristocracy, the church, and the king were all given the collective power of the single monarch.
And that was a gift given, and they were told, you accept this gift, and what we expect of you is hard work.
Not hard work at what we tell you is tough, but hard work at whatever you think you want to do.
You graduate from a passive citizen To an active one.
An active citizen who has the right to give his opinion about public issues and the right to allow that your ideas are just as smart as your congressman and that there was no reason ever given Why you're being turned into a politically active citizenship.
Why did that change things?
Because you were placed in the driver's seat.
You were not a passenger and you were not a mechanic.
You were whatever you wanted to be.
And when you did that, and it was rewarded by success, you kept the reward.
It wasn't taken from you.
You were allowed to take it.
And applauded for doing so.
And so there was every reason on earth to think of America as God's gift.
As the gift of the monarch to the people of the country, without any right or privilege, this is who ran the country.
The public.
And this man who called it common cause...
Was trying to create a foot in both politics and in the public wheel, the public good.
And it worked.
Because when you put together the qualities necessary for citizenship, public active citizenship, you found that as you grew into expertise in anything, you were also learning how to run the country.
And you took classes, public school classes.
In the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln's second inaugural, and stuff like that.
And that's why it became a truth that you could rise from a log cabin and end up in the presidency.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, more with Richard Dreyfuss.
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I'm back with actor Richard Dreyfuss.
You can follow him on Twitter, at Richard Dreyfuss, the website, thedreyfussinitiative.org.
Richard, you know, earlier generations in American history often had cataclysmic struggles that they had to go through, which seemed to have been really important in character formation.
I'm thinking of the Civil War, think about World War II, of course, earlier the Depression.
Now, obviously, the generation of the 50s and 60s By comparison, had it really easy.
Now, there was the Vietnam War.
I don't want to minimize that, but compared to the struggles of growing up with scarcity, with a world war going on.
And my question is, where did civics education kind of fall down the cracks?
Did that happen in the 60s, in the 70s, more recently?
And also, how do we revive it?
This may take more than seven minutes, but let me put it to you this way.
I graduated high school in 1965.
I had a perfect education in civics.
What is civics?
Civics are the tools that allow the young to grasp the notion that That they are being handed the greatest gift on earth.
The participatory citizenship of all.
And there were philosophers who argued back and forth as to what exactly is a civic tool.
And It was basically all the tools necessary for you to improve your own mind.
And that meant learning a vocabulary that was primarily...
Far past what you thought were your capabilities.
They were the tools that allowed you to reach excellence or allowed you to appreciate the excellence necessary for you to be President of the United States.
And I'm not exaggerating that point.
There were people born in total poverty and they were allowed at a certain moment to realize that they were in fact part of the resource pool that the government needed to achieve that resource and to become that citizen.
And that's what they did.
And so President McKinley and President Lincoln and just about everyone except the Adams family because they kind of inherited the good luck.
But at the same time, They were allowed to go for it.
No one kept them out of school.
No one kept them out of the righteous indignation of, wait a minute, you told me that I could become president.
Why aren't you letting me become president?
And What happened was that there were rich people and haughty people and aristocratic people who thought that they weren't good enough.
And so they did everything possible to keep them back.
But the force of this new idea was so great That they got trampled in the mad rush to achieve personal and public power.
Richard, we have to close out, but I want to thank you for joining me.
This has been really interesting, guys.
The book, One Thought Scares Me by Richard Dreyfuss, the website, thedreyfussinitiative.org.
Richard Dreyfuss, thank you so much.
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