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Nov. 21, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
52:46
EXCLUSIVE: Succession Actress & Podcast Host Dasha Nekrasova Speaks Out About Hollywood Cancellation Over Fuentes Interview

EXCLUSIVE: actress and podcast host Dasha Nekrasova speaks out for the first time after being fired from her agency over Red Scare's Nick Fuentes interview. --------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening, it's Thursday, November 20th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 o'clock p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, when Donald Trump assumed office at the beginning of this year, many declared that so-called cancel culture was dead or at least dying.
And certain expressions of that tactic in some areas and for some opinions have indeed lost significant force.
But in other areas, cancel culture, roughly defined as the loss of one's career or job or livelihood due to perceived political opinions or past associations, continues to thrive more strongly than ever.
Anyone who doubts that can look at what just happened to the actress and podcast host, Dasha Necrosova.
Best known in Hollywood for her recurring character on the HBO hit show Succession and in the world of politics and culture for her co-hosting of the highly popular Red Scare podcast, Necrosova just suffered a very public punishment in her acting career for the crime of interviewing one Nicolas J. Fuentes.
The role she has had with a film that was expected to begin shooting next week where she was to play one of the characters was rescinded.
And a longtime talent agency very publicly announced that it was terminating all ties with her following three or four weeks after she interviewed Nick Fuentes for her show.
Hollywood loves to depict itself as a bastion of free speech and free thought, often invoking its self-serving iconography of confronting McCarthyite blacklist and various types of other censorship.
But the reality of Hollywood, like so many American power centers, has long been one instead of rigid political repression and punishes anyone who deviates from their most sacred political dogmas.
Still, Necrocova's public punishment for the crime of interviewing Nick Fuentes, someone whose influence is now beyond dispute, and who has, as a result, been interviewed by countless mainstream news and media outlets, reveals a great deal about where cancel culture continues to thrive in the name of what causes it continues to be imposed.
We'll talk to Necrosova, her first interview, her only interview, since news of all of this broke last week about everything that happened here, as well as she has how she has long tried to navigate being a cultural commentator on a rather heterox podcast with also trying to have a career in Hollywood.
Before we get to all of that, a few quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update right after this brief message from our sponsor.
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Dasha Nekrasova is somebody who often hosts a very popular podcast.
She also is somebody who has pursued to some excess a career as an actress and even a director and producer in Hollywood, yet she found herself at the middle of a news story that originated of Hollywood, but has spread throughout the political world because of the repercussions involving punishments that likely are to be enduring, even permanent to her career in Hollywood as a result of interviews she conducted on her program Red Scare,
which is the podcast that she co-hosts, which has essentially been around since 2017 or so.
It has always been a very heterodox sort of show.
It's difficult to pigeonhole.
I wouldn't even call it a politics show necessarily, more of a cultural commentary show.
Though it does certainly have a lot of political guests and talk about political topics, but not quite in the same way political shows do.
I've been on that show as a guest, on that podcast many times, not for a couple of years, but since its inception.
And it really is a kind of its own category of podcasts, which is one of the reasons it has become so popular.
It's a very kind of idiosyncratic cult following, but a lot of people listen to Red Scare and they're funded mostly, or exclusively rather, by Patreon.
So for those of you who aren't familiar with this podcast, and if you aren't, I suggest you give it a listen.
There's really not a lot like it.
Here you see the kind of whimsical nature of it, just to make clear that it's not purporting to be meet the press or some serious political program where leading Hollywood figures should be so preoccupied with what guests go on to this show.
The tagline is the ladies make a podcast.
And there you see a woman with her shirt elevated where it says Red Scare.
And this is sort of the whimsical, playful tone and ethos of the show that's reflected in this image.
Again, it's very hard to pigeonhole or explain, but suffice to say, it's not really primarily a political show, notwithstanding how many political guests they've had.
Now, what they really look to is they try and do interesting cultural commentary things in the culture.
And I don't just mean culture in terms of film or art, but also culture, meaning politics.
All of that composes American culture.
And I would say that the only common thread of all their guests are people who, for whatever reason, they personally find interesting.
And they've interviewed very controversial people over many years, the way most, say, independent media outlets do.
We certainly have had our share of very controversial guests.
It's something that if you're actually interested in hearing from people other than the ones who just are put through the DC swap machine of Sunday news shows and cable programming, you're going to always, of course, talk to fringe people, marginalized people, people very controversial.
And oftentimes those are where the most interesting perspectives lie.
And they have been the subject Red Scare has of a lot of commentary in the mainstream press, especially since they sort of began with a left-wing perception that kind of grew out of the movement that supported Bernie Sanders.
But really their immersion occurred as a result of their criticism as two women of the excesses of the Me Too movement, which they were denouncing almost from the start of the Me Too movement, anticipating where this would go in terms of the abuses.
That's what really brought them on the map, got a lot of audience.
And already they were obviously somebody whose perspective and agenda wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms in mainstream media outlets.
So a lot of the attention they had been getting was often negative, but that became even more so as they interviewed a lot of controversial hosts, people like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones and Curtis Jarvin, but lots of people on the left as well.
It's just a very eclectic kind of show.
And certainly nothing like what happened this week to Dasha in terms of her acting career was ever provoked by any of those other deaths.
She certainly suffered some in her career as a result of her political views in hosting this podcast, but she had a reasonably successful career in film and was able to reconcile them both.
Here's the sort of thing that Red Scare, how Red Scare used to be covered in sort of the liberal, mainstream liberal press.
This is from New York magazine in October 2018, near the start of their show, as they began to become much better known, much better listened to, had a lot of explosive growth.
There you see the title.
And again, this is a very sort of typically liberal New York magazine.
The title was Red Scare Leans Into Nothing, a podcast that offers a critique of feminism and capitalism from deep inside the culture they've spawned.
So there you see the two of them.
They're often criticized for their kind of ironic posture.
Sometimes it's viewed as nihilism.
They're very funny.
They're both very smart.
And I've always thought the show was worth listening to.
But this is the kind of media reception that never really knew what to do with Red Scare, but it's been around for a long time, based in New York.
And it's a, by all metrics, popular program.
Certainly not as big as, say, Joe Rogan's show or in the same universe as other of the top leading podcasts in the country, but it has a very strong cult following, a very sizable audience that has long made it interesting and worth paying attention to.
And as I've said, Dasha Nekrasova has been able to do all that while pursuing a pretty successful acting career, including sort of the crown achievement of her career in Hollywood was that she was a recurring character on the hit HBO show Succession for season three.
I think she appeared in every episode.
Wasn't a major character, but certainly the next level.
And she's had other types of successes in her acting career as well.
All of that has changed.
She's now in the subject of a kind of cancellation in Hollywood that a lot of people thought was no longer going to exist once people started becoming aware of the excesses and destruction and how toxic cancel culture in its purest form, which is what this is, is, and with the election of Donald Trump.
But she's undergoing the kind of cancellation that was sort of peak wokeism of 2020.
And it pretty clearly seems to have been triggered by one event.
Obviously, the other things she said and done that don't exactly embody and align with Hollywood Orthodoxy have contributed to it to brought us to this moment.
But the breaking point, sort of like the breaking point of conservatives attacking Tucker Carlson in the Civil War, the MAGA movement, was their decision, like many, many other shows have made, including our show, to interview somebody who is undoubtedly very influential, both in politics and in culture, especially among young people, and that's Nick Fuentes.
It was on October 10th when that episode aired.
There you see it.
This is from their Patreon list of shows, which is where they appear on Patreon.
It's how they are funded and supported by their listeners through Patreon.
The title of it was Fuentanol OD with Nicholas J. Fuentes, Good will play on the World Fentanol.
And there you see a picture of those three of them.
That's on on the right, Dasha on the left, and Nick Fuentes in between.
And I wouldn't really describe this particular interaction as friendly.
It wasn't hostile, but it was basically the two of them asking Nick Fuentes questions about what he thinks about certain issues and then pressing him when they thought maybe some of it needed to be elaborated more or overplayed.
It was very similar, I thought, to the Tucker interview.
Although obviously this is lighter, a little more ironic, because again, they don't report to be a political show.
But it certainly wasn't a show, here's the person who we consider our leader.
Here's somebody who is speaking the most important truths that are opening.
It was just a show of a guest that they find interesting, like every other one they've been doing for a long time.
Somebody who wields influence, somebody who has things to say, and they were trying to dig into the roots of what he thinks.
And their interview style is very different than most people's, and it does elicit things that you don't normally say.
I've had that experience where I've gotten on that show and talked about things or talked about it in a way that I don't normally do and didn't expect to because of the style that just kind of keeps you disoriented because it's so unfamiliar.
It was an interesting episode.
Probably not the most interesting Nick Fuentes appearance, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary.
They did the interview.
It seemed like things were more or less copacetic.
And then on November 14th, Variety, which is one of the main industry journals, the main industry magazines in Hollywood, ran this headline, which was this.
Gersh, which is a talent agency that represented Dasha for quite a while and trying to get her roles in her career, drops succession actress Dasha Necrosova after her podcast with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
So they are clearly linking the two events, not necessarily saying it's the only cause, but clearly implying that there's great causal connection, which of course there is.
So she had a guest on her show, interviewed him, questioned him, and for that crime, her own agents, who have a duty to promote her career, sort of like a lawyer or a doctor, somebody who is duty bound to advance your interest, not only terminated her quietly, they ran to the Hollywood press to announce that they were disassociating themselves from her.
So you can only imagine the motivations that would lead somebody to do that.
Now, when we reached out to Dasha a few days ago about the possibility of coming on our show and talking for the first time, she hasn't given any interviews either in print or a video explaining what happened and why.
At the time, she really, when I had a brief conversation with her about what happened, she really wasn't certain.
She knew that her talent agency had her agents had called her to say they're terminating their relationship.
She obviously knew it was in the context of Nick Fuentes' interview.
But she wasn't really sure.
She speculated that there might have been a few stray comments about a film that she was just hired to do.
And the producer of that film, as part of this news reporting demonstrates, fired her as well.
It wasn't just her agents, but it was this film she was set to begin filming next week.
The producer of the film also fired her.
And she thought maybe there were in the announcements of this film and her role in it, a couple of internet comments.
You would think most people who use the internet don't care about internet comments.
They know it's not representative of anything, but a lot of people in industries of power are very sensitive to those.
If they read one or two, like, why are you hiring someone who's a Nazi or associated with Nazi?
That can really affect people's decision making, even just anonymous comments, straight comments.
And she thought that that was maybe what generated the pressure.
As it turns out, The Hollywood Reporter, which is another significant industry journal in Hollywood, has a very lengthy article today explaining what actually happened, what actually led to her agents and these film producers canceling her.
And it is a surprisingly sympathetic article that makes her look like the victim of some of the most extremist and most destructive and toxic forms of cancer culture and the person responsible look like an unhinged maniac.
And we're going to talk to Dasha in just a second.
She just earned it this when the Hollywood Reporter reported it as well.
She's some really interesting things to say about this.
But basically, here you see the headline, The Long, Thorny Path to Dasha Necrosova's Hollywood shunning.
So she's officially shunned, according to what you could say is the official journal of Hollywood, which is the Hollywood Reporter.
She's now shunned.
And it tells the story of exactly how and why.
And it's not because extremely powerful people in Hollywood heard the Nick Fuentes interview and then top down ordered her to be fired.
I mean, again, it's a successful podcast, but it's not a podcast that influences millions.
Like, who would even care what guests they have on, really?
Especially given the guest in question.
There's a guest that has been on so many other shows, including ones with much larger, more political audiences.
But what actually happened, it centers around somebody named Jonathan Daniel Brown, who had a sort of acting career in Hollywood when he was a teenager and has kind of just floated around Hollywood, doesn't really work anymore as an actor, kind of is involved in some producing things.
But apparently what he actually does instead is monitors people's opinions who work in Hollywood and try and get them destroyed and fired if they have opinions that he dislikes, especially on Israel.
There you see a picture of him.
Sometimes pictures really do tell the story.
They really are worth a thousand words, if not more.
There you can see him, Jonathan Daniel Brown, the person who engaged in this behavior as described by the Hollywood reporter.
Quote, Jonathan Daniel Brown was not in a laughing mood when he wrote his email to Gersh.
That's Dasha's agency.
An agency to which he has no formal ties.
He had been tracking one of Gersh's clients, Dasha Necrosova, for some time.
For two years, Brown kept listening to Red Scare and kept emailing Gersh with warnings that their client was platforming dangerous hate speech.
But Brown was not done.
Several days earlier, it had been reported that Necrosova had been cast in Iconoclast, the feature filming, debuting director, the feature film directing debut of actor Gabriel Basso, who just as an aside was the one who played JD Vance in the film made on his book.
Quote, be careful, he wrote.
Dasha just did a podcast with Nick Fuentes.
Bad idea to be associated with anyone who is openly pro-Hitler.
Oh, wow, the producer of the film responded.
Quote, this is the producer of the film.
The other producer is Jewish and is friends with her.
I don't know her.
When news broke that Gersh dropped Necrosova, Brown texted the iconoclast producer again.
Quote, I hope you find an excellent actress to replace her, Brown wrote, quote, yes, she is being replaced right now, the producer responded.
And it goes into a lot more detail about just what an obsessive campaign this was to destroy Dasha Necrosova's career in Hollywood.
Not because she committed any crimes, not because she's accused of being involved in any scandals of any kind, but simply because this random person who's a fanatical supporter of Israel and a Hollywood liberal dislikes the guests that Red Scare has hosted, that she's been speaking to, that she asks questions of.
One thing that I found most notable in the interview that we're about to show you is And again, I have some familiarity with how eclectic and diverse their guest list is.
Sometimes they're not even political.
They've interviewed people all the way on the left to all the way on the right and everything in between.
Dasha pointed out that the guest that they had on prior, immediately prior to Nick Fuentes was Thomas and Chatterton Williams, who was I remarked in my conversation with her.
We taped just a little bit earlier today.
It's about as much of the antithesis of Nick Fuentes as it gets, somebody who's an utterly, I'll say banal establishment thinker, writes for the Atlantic, just has every dreary, centrist, predictable view, nothing radical about him in any single conceivable way.
Just to illustrate the point that they talk to everybody.
They talk to a huge range of people.
And this idea that you're no longer allowed to platform people if they have political views deemed in Hollywood to be offensive, even though Nick Fuentes' own platform is infinitely larger than Red Scare's.
It's not so much about the specific issue with Dash Nekrasova and her career.
As I said, she has a good career, a good job as a podcaster.
She makes a decent living.
And I hope you'll consider checking out not only her podcast, but also becoming a subscriber to it through Patreon, because one of the only effective ways to punish this kind of tactic where you threaten people with career destruction,
destruction to their livelihood, if they express criticism of a certain issue that's sacred to you or they speak to people who you put on the no platform list is to have the public rise in their defense and make sure that their career and their livelihood aren't destroyed.
Because if you allow these campaigns to succeed and people see what happened to her, what happened to so many other people, what they're trying to do with Tucker, and if it works and she's impoverished, she loses her income, whatever, as has happened, obviously any rational person looking at that is going to think, oh, wow, I'd like to speak out on these issues, or I'd like to speak to this person, but I just watched what they did to her.
And I don't want to become that.
I have, on my own, I haven't talked about it much, but if there's a political candidate who's targeted for destruction by APAC or by the Israel lobby or people who are fired, I do look for ways to try and make that less of an effective tactic.
And one way you could do that is by listening to Red Scare, especially through Patreon, even for the time being, just as she sort of transitions now into what seems like, given how publicly this was done and put in all the Hollywood journals, is probably a deathblue to whatever acting career that she hoped to have.
And she is a big fan of film, a student of film, of old film.
She actually produced and directed her own independent film.
So she lost a lot.
And we ask her whether she regrets it.
We ask her her thought process behind it about all of these issues adjacent to what happened to her.
And I think you'll find the interview extremely interesting.
I know I did.
And as I said, it's an exclusive interview in the sense that she has not spoken yet about any of this that has happened until tonight.
So you're going to hear from her very shortly right after this.
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Dutch, it's really great to see you.
I wish it were under better circumstances, but nonetheless, I'm always happy to see you and we appreciate your taking the time to come and talk to us.
It's great to see you, Glenn.
Thanks for doing this.
Absolutely.
All right.
So let's just dive right in to everything that has happened in your acting part of your professional life over the past several weeks.
There have been many times during your work as a podcast host, a podcast that is very popular, but has always been, you know, edgy and sort of covering issues in a way that might offend people or provoke disagreement.
Something I don't know much about, but I know that your podcast is something that does that.
And there's always been this question, you know, to what extent it might conflict with your work as a kind of mainstream actress.
And for the most part, you know, I'm sure there have been some bumps, and we'll talk about those.
I know there have been, but nothing quite like this.
And this seems to clearly have been precipitated, this termination on the part of your agents, by the interview that you did for Red Scare with your co-host Ana of one Nicholas Fuentes.
And allegedly, yeah.
Yeah, that definitely seems to have been at least the straw that broke the camel's back, or maybe even the overwhelming cause based on what we can discern.
I want to ask you about that.
But before we get into everything that happened afterwards, I just want to ask you about the thought process before.
Why did you decide to invite Nick Fuentes on your show?
Well, first off, we had Nick on the show over a month ago.
So it wasn't as if this was an immediate consequence of something I had done, which wouldn't have really been surprising.
I'm not surprised to even have been dropped by my agency so much, but more so how it happened.
I had Nick on because he obviously was an ascendant figure in not just right-wing media, but media in general.
That once they uncensored him, he became incredibly prominent.
And I watch his show.
I, you know, I don't feel the need to detail all the ways in which I disagree with him.
I think I did that a bit even when I interviewed him.
But he's obviously incredibly talented, telegenic.
I think part of the appeal, part of what I like about him, is that he was so maligned.
He had so much against him, you know, debanked, no fly list, throttled in the crib.
And so to see his generational run, regardless of how you feel about him, was inspiring because it was just an example of someone who like stayed true to themselves, I guess.
And then broadly, I mean, America First is clearly a compelling ideology for a lot of people.
You know, as somebody who's watched or listened to your show, kind of watched the growth of it, not necessarily from the beginning exactly, but very close to the beginning for many years now.
When people try and who don't know your show try and ask me about it, because of course I've been on there many times as well, and I try and explain it, I always kind of emphasize that it's really, I don't think of it as a political show.
There are programs, for example, that tend to have people on who largely agree with their political ideology.
So you watch like Sean Hannity, you're going to see just political conservatives.
You watch Rachel Maddie, you're going to see liberals.
Your show never seemed to me at all, given the range of guests you've interviewed over the years, to reflect any sort of political agenda, meaning there's no basis for assuming that you agree with the guests that you have on, including Nick Fuentes.
What are the criteria generally that you use or have used over the years to decide who you want to invite on?
I mean, like you said, it's an entertainment show.
So my goal is with guests.
It's either someone that I'm interested in for whatever cultural reason or that are of interest to the general public.
I guess what I'm asking is, you know, if someone were to ask me like, hey, what kind of show do you host?
I would say, oh, it's a politics and journalism show.
You know, we cover political and journalistic issues, you know, 95% of the time, maybe occasionally some sort of cultural issue if it pertains to political issues.
But in general, this is a political show and we cover political topics.
I've never really thought about Red Scare, as I said, as a politics show, notwithstanding the fact that you do often talk about political topics and have on guests perceived as political.
How do you conceive of Red Scare and what it does?
I've always said cultural commentary.
That seems like it applies to our more political and aesthetic range.
But definitely not a show I would say that has an agenda, though I know it is provocative.
Is there at all any sense that you confine yourself to inviting guests on with whom you have overwhelming political agreement?
Sorry, what do you mean?
Like in general, when you're deciding what guests you want to have on, do you generally try and only have guests on with whom you have political disagreement?
Or is it kind of like a gamut of people, whether you disagree with them or not, as long as they're interesting to you or to your audience in some way?
No, I mean, the week prior to Nick, we had on Thomas Chatterton Williams.
We discussed his book.
We have maybe more right-leaning guests now, but that seems more of a result of like guilt by association, you know, more left-leaning people not wanting to be associated.
Yeah, there's like a self-selection process for guests who won't go on shows if they perceive they're going to be asked hard questions politically.
I mean, it is interesting, though.
I can't think of a person more different than Nick Fuentes on every level than Thomas Chatterton Williams, who's just like literally the week before.
Mainstream centrist Atlantic writer, you can't really get any more far afield from Nick Fuentes than he.
All right.
You know, we had Nick Fuentes on our show a few weeks before you interviewed him.
And we had been planning this for quite a while.
It was hard to nail down logistically for a lot of reasons, which I think is the case for you as well.
And obviously, you know, we thought about and talked about beforehand what might be the repercussions of having him on, given how controversial of a figure he is.
But I'll just quickly tell you my thought process, which was by this point, his influence, as you alluded to, has grown so much that there's basically nobody not interviewing Nick Fuentes at this point.
I think there have been, you know, 10 or 15 New York Times articles and profiles over the last two months alone that interviewed Nick Fuentes.
He's been on every show.
There's footage of him on every news program.
He's clearly a major cultural and political figure, regardless of whether you hate him or love him or whatever.
And my thought process was that's what our show is designed to do is to interview and hear from and question people who have influence.
I'm wondering what your thought process was.
Did you expect there to be kind of the repercussions that you've seen?
And if so, how did you kind of navigate that?
No, well, yeah, we wanted to have him on.
I reached out to him.
Originally, we were supposed to have him on the weekend that Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
And then that obviously we rescheduled.
But at that point, yeah, he had already done his interview with you.
He'd been on Candace.
He went on some other podcasts.
He hadn't yet done Tucker.
But he was not Paper But David, which is, you know, I think one of the top 50 podcasts in the country.
Exactly.
So my sense was that, like, even though he was controversial, that the Overton window of who was acceptable to talk to had shifted.
And again, like I said, if it had, if I had gotten in trouble right after, it would have been different.
But I think after he went on Tucker and then all of this discourse about renouncing him started, I guess I feel a bit just kind of like collateral damage and something that didn't wasn't really about me or my interview with Nick.
All right, so let's talk about that because the kind of proximate cause for your being in the news, for your being here, although you're always welcome, and you've been here before, we don't wait till your agents get rid of you for you to come on, but that's why you're here today.
Is because you have a talent agency that represents you in your acting career called Gersh.
And the news broke, I guess in deadline, that they had advised you that they were terminating their relationship with you.
And it seemed very clear that it was due to the Nick Fuentes interview.
How did that evolve?
How did they communicate that to you?
And what reasons did they provide from your end?
Well, in addition to being dropped from Gersh, I was also fired from a film I was supposed to shoot this week.
And I found out on Friday that the producers of that film had rescinded my contract.
I then spoke to my agents who said the producers were being kind of opaque, but that they saw that there was a someone left a comment on deadline about how I had a Holocaust denire on my show.
And that that was ostensibly, I guess, the reason.
And then when I talked to my reps the next day, they said the timeline is so maybe not bizarre, but yeah, they said that I had to be dropped from the movie because the producers were getting inquiries from reporters about how I had been fired from the movie and dropped from Gersh.
Like it was this like Kafka-esque.
It did none of it really like quite made sense.
Though broadly, I understood, like, you know, I would have dropped me a long time ago, frankly.
Right, but I think the fact that they didn't is really interesting when I get into that because it's not like Nick Fuentes is the first controversial guest, extremely controversial guest you've had on Red Scara, and none of those other people prompted your talent agency to fire you or to get to terminate the representation of you or a film to fire you.
Nick Funtes did.
So I want to get into a little bit to the differences between Nick Fuentes and these other guests, but what was the because I think maybe for a lot of people who don't know, the relationship between agent and actor, you know, it's very similar to lawyer, client, or even doctor, patient.
They owe duties to you.
It can be a very close relationship.
You're both working toward a common goal of building your career.
They benefit, you benefit.
It's really based on a relationship of trust and confidence.
And this seems to be a pretty clear betrayal of people that you've worked with for a while on something that was important to you and presumably to them.
What was their message and what was the attitude that they adopted when delivering it about why they were separating for you?
A kind of, honestly, a kind of like sadness and inevitability.
It felt like there wasn't so much of like a top-down process as a lot of people who didn't want to get in trouble.
And my reps knew I had Nick Funtes on a month ago and I did.
And so afterwards, this article in the Hollywood Reporter came to light that there was this man, this former child actor, Jonathan Daniel Brown.
Jonathan Daniel Brown.
Yes.
So when I was speaking to my agents, I had already caught when that Jonathan Daniel Brown was like calling from my head on social media.
And so when I was told that I was dropped, I said, oh, does this have to do with Jonathan Daniel Brown?
Because I knew that he had emailed my reps before years ago.
I didn't realize the extent to which he was fixated on me.
But exactly, like you said, like this is exactly the kind of person that an agent should be protecting a client from like a bitter hater.
And additionally, the way, you know, they could have also dropped me discreetly.
But the sort of subsequent shunning, public shaming aspect of it made it seem to me that I was being made a convenient example of.
And at the behest of this guy who seems, I don't know, he seems litigious, so I don't want to.
I'll say he seems very unhinged and almost obsessive, like in a way that might justify a metaphorical restraining order.
But I want to delve into that a little bit because when we reached out to you a few days ago about coming on and talking about everything that happened, you didn't have a very clear understanding of what had prompted this.
You had offered the speculation you just offered me, which was there were a few stray comments and deadline comments.
And people who are very sensitive to public perceptions are often overly invest too much importance in a few stray anonymous comments here and there.
But then this Hollywood Reporter article came out, I believe this morning, that was really a very detailed timeline of what led to the termination by your talent agency as well as the producer of this film.
And they did basically blame it all on this one person, Jonathan Daniel Brown, who, as you said, had some kind of acting background, but he's hardly an A-lister, a B or C or D lister.
He's really, I guess he does some production.
He's in Hollywood, but it's not like he's a major figure.
And according to the Hollywood Reporter article, and it really goes into length at just how obsessive he has been with destroying your career over what he perceives to be your politics.
The reporter, the Hollywood Reporter article says, Jonathan Daniel Brown has been tracking one of Gersh's clients, Dasha Nekrasova, for some time.
For two years, Brown kept listening to Red Scare and kept emailing Gersh with warnings that their client was platforming dangerous hate speech.
And they mentioned people like Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, Alex Jones, Bruns, Age Pervert, Steve Seller.
These are all people who have been in the news and on shows for many years now.
We spent so much time about the evils of cancel culture, about having people have their careers destroyed or their jobs terminated because of their political views.
This is such a classic case of it.
I mean, this is like one guy obsessively listening to your show and writing to producers and everyone in Hollywood, you know, and that sort of you'll never work in this town again because he doesn't like the guests who are coming on your show.
What do you make of all this?
I mean, I'm shocked that they even wrote that article because he seems like such a straightforward villain in the narrative.
Obviously, I'm biased, but even just reading that article, I don't think he comes off particularly well.
And yeah, as you pointed out, he's a bit of a failure.
I'm more successful than he is, but I'm also not that.
I've already kind of been like de facto blacklisted.
And that's been made clear to me by my reps at various points, you know, that there are consequences for my actions, which means some people won't want to work with me, which I completely understand.
But that there was some, yeah, pressing need not just to drop me, but then to also have the media around me being dropped.
It feels, and I'm not, I don't, I don't feel like a victim, but it just, it does feel unfair.
Yeah, well, you know, I want to get into that just one second, but I just want to focus in a little bit about these other guests that the Hollywood Reporter article mentioned as people who Jonathan Daniel Brown was complaining about to your agents trying to get you fired because it didn't work.
None of it worked.
He's been at this for years, like apparently obsessively listening to your show, probably reading the subreddit of Red Scare, you know, just monitoring constantly.
And he's been trying to get you fired from projects and your talent agency to and your representatives to terminate you.
And it didn't work for all this time until you interviewed Nick Funtes.
And one of the things the Hollywood Reporter article mentioned was that he was claiming you were putting on guests who have a history of quite racist statements.
He talked about Steve Seller and the immigration contacts.
Also, Steve Bannon.
He mentioned Curtis Yarvin.
These are like, you know, major influential figures in various factions of right-wing politics.
And if his, one of the things that's really striking me, Dasha, in general, about the whole eruption in right-wing politics about Nick Funtes, particularly since he went on Tucker's show, is that it's not like racist discourse is alien to right-wing politics.
You're absolutely free, especially in the Trump era, to talk about white nationalism and black crime.
I mean, a whole list of things that used to be kind of considered taboo for a long time.
And none of that results in anyone's expulsion from the party or anyone getting fired.
And Nick Fuentes shares a lot of those views.
It's just that what differentiates him from all those other people is that, on top of talking about all those other groups that those guests talked about, he also talks a lot about Israel and they're primarily Jewish supporters, or at least, you know, overwhelmingly Jewish supporters and as that part of the Israel lobby inside the United States.
I mean, that seems to be the deal breaker for Hollywood and for so many other centers of power.
How do you assess that?
Like, why didn't these other people cause these kinds of terminations or consequences, whereas Nick Fuentes did?
I definitely think Israel's part of it.
I think his ascendancy and influence is also part of it.
Like, you know, Steve Saylor has been writing about crime statistics for decades.
And it is only now recently, like, has it been okay to cite him?
And I don't think he is a hateful person or even a particularly like political person.
But yeah, he doesn't obviously criticize the same lobbyist groups that Nick does.
And, you know, but it also strikes me that, you know, I interviewed Nick.
I don't think the consequences were particularly significant.
I don't think they were significant for any other of these shows, including very large ones on independent media that interviewed Nick.
I haven't heard people losing advertisements over it, although there was a campaign to drive Tucker's advertisements away.
But still, these are people that are political shows, including ones with a much bigger audience than Red Skier has, who put Nick on.
And for whatever reason, you seem to have suffered the most significant consequences by far from having talked to Nick Fuentes of all these other people who could have been candidates for that.
And it's notable that your consequences happened in Hollywood.
And this has been something that has been bothering me for a long time.
And I'm interested in your view on it, given how much of your work has involved Hollywood.
You know, Hollywood has this very self-important political ethos.
There's like a part of the lore of Hollywood mythology is we battled McCarthyism, which was about trying to destroy people's careers because of their left-wing political views, screenwriters being black.
The original Red Scare.
The original Red Scare, exactly.
You know, everybody who was under any kind of suspicion for any association with the wrong ideology had their careers destroyed in Hollywood.
This is something supposed to be that Hollywood was always like sort of embedded in their DNA was this commitment to fighting.
And just like in any artistic community, like ideals of free speech and free thought are also purportedly extremely important.
And yet here you are, all but having your career in that very community destroyed for the crime of either having the wrong politics in their minds or for having talked to somebody who does.
I'm just how do you reconcile this kind of branding of Hollywood and who these people are versus how they actually respond when faced with dissenting views?
I mean, there's certainly a hypocrisy there.
But I mean, like I said, I already wasn't.
It's not like I was working so much.
I didn't even meet the earnings threshold this year to have insurance.
I after basically after I had Alex Jones on a couple years ago, it was made clear to me, yeah, that that was not advisable or something that I would have to negotiate.
And part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I do identify as like a free speech absolutist.
And so that's always been something that I've have had convictions about, knowing that they would have consequences.
But the way that this has played out has felt especially hypocritical and unprofessional.
Yeah, I know from having from the way I know you that you're somebody who actually is a really passionate fan of film.
You know, you're kind of a student of film, you studied it, you produced and directed your own independent film.
I know film is very important to you.
Obviously, at some point along the way with Red Scare, you came to the realization, as you said, that there may be a big conflict between your commentary on Red Scare, talking about the things that interest you and the ways that interest you and your ability to have a film career.
As you said, also, this is not the first time your film, your career has suffered in Hollywood because of your political views, although this seems an escalation.
Given how much you do love film, how important it is you to be in acting, to be in producing films, do you feel any kind of regret about having had Nick Fuentes on, given the consequences it seems to have had for you?
No, I don't.
Partly because, you know, if, I mean, Hollywood's down really bad.
After COVID, after the writer's strike, after the actors' strike, I think there's something like 40% less shows even being produced than there were just last year.
If Hollywood felt more sustainable, maybe I would have made different choices.
But I, but probably not.
Because I don't live in Belarus where I was born.
And I think you did at least.
It seems like it wasn't.
Yeah, I didn't realize I thought my family fled the Soviet Union.
Let me just add a couple more questions.
One of the things people know you best for outside of your hosting of Red Scare was your regular appearance on the third season of Succession.
And there was a lot of speculation, and I don't mean just idle speculation on the internet, but I think even in trade magazines and the like, that your character was going to have an even more prominent storyline in the fourth and last season of Succession, possibly including a romantic relationship with one of the main characters and the like.
And as it turned out, your character didn't reappear for season four, only for season three.
Did you ever hear directly or in a reliable way that part of the reason for that was your views and other kinds of speech on Red Scare and elsewhere?
No, but I don't know.
I don't know if I could infer that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
But I was never told directly, no, but I was because I had Alex Jones on after, I think while my film came out around the time Succession was airing, around the time I had Alex Jones on.
And so that was sort of, yeah, something else I have no regrets about, honestly.
Yeah, and I think there was a big article in the New York Times, if I'm not mistaken, with a picture of you and Ana with Alex Jones.
So you need to get that.
Yeah, sorry.
No worries.
All right, my last question.
I know there are a lot of people in my audience and elsewhere who reacted angrily toward this news that you suffer these consequences simply for the crime of not even criticizing Israel.
You've actually sometimes expressed some support for Israel.
But, you know, it's not something that you're that interested in, but simply for the crime of talking to somebody who criticizes Israel and the U.S. lobby.
I know there were Israeli.
I know there were a lot of people who were very angry about that.
I'm sure they'll be angrier still to learn these details that we learned today in the Hollywood Reporter about exactly how it happened and the cowardice with which the film's producers, as well as your agents, acted.
And I think one of the ways that you can combat these sorts of things is by supporting the work that somebody who decided to confront these limitations on speech, even at the expense of their own career, is doing.
So one of the ways that people listen to Red Scare, I think it's every fourth episode or something is available solely for your Patreon subscribers.
That's the sole revenue you earn from Red Scare.
Can you just tell people how they can go about supporting Red Scare and the show, if they're inclined to do so?
It's every other episode we do is paywalled on Patreon, patreon.com slash Red Scare.
That's, yeah, that's how you can access it as well as our free ones on normal podcasting.
Well, I really hope people won't do that because I think it's so important for these campaigns not to result, even if they quote unquote succeed in being able to destroy somebody's livelihood or career, because all that does is scare people and deter people in the future from raising these topics that people at Hollywood or media or finance or whatever don't like.
And the more people see that there's public support for them when they do so, I think the more likely it is that such efforts will fail.
All right, Dasha.
Well, it's unfortunate that all of that has happened to you, but I know whatever you do will continue to thrive, including Red Scare.
And it was great talking to you, and it was always great to see you as well.
Thanks, Glenn.
I appreciate it.
All right.
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