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April 23, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

45:43

Growing Up with Communists & America’s Final Stage | Richard Dreyfuss | POLITICS | Rubin Report

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dave rubin

08:23

richard dreyfuss

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richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		I am pretty convinced that we are in the last stages of the ability for America to survive.
		We are in an endgame right now, and that is not a liberal endgame or a conservative endgame.
		It's a combination of both, and we are without mercy.
		And we are without forgiveness.
		And we have to rethink that.
		We have to get it back into the earliest years of public schools so that your civic education is complete by high school graduation.
		It has nothing to do with college or university.
		And the more you explore that, The more you'll see why that's simple and commonsensical.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an Academy Award winning actor, author of One Thought Scares Me, We Teach Our Children What We Wish Them To Know, We Don't Teach Our Children What We Don't Wish Them To Know, and a guy with a lot of moxie, Richard Dreyfuss.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to the Rubin Report.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Hiya.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Richard, you do have a lot of moxie.
		For some reason, that line seemed like the one that I should go to in the intro.
		I could have gone through about 800 movies.
		How do you feel about a Lost in Yonkers reference right up top?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		For some reason, every bio of me starts out with, what a cocky, arrogant guy I am, or was, or something.
		I don't really, I don't agree with it, but I don't, you know, want to start a war.
		So, uh, I let it go.
		But, I think it's just that I'm, I tell my truth.
		I tell the truth.
		I tell my truth whether it's anti-Richard or pro-Richard.
		So, um, and I think that people are, are, uh, Surprised by that.
		There was an article once about the fact that Barbara Streisand and Richard Dreyfuss were the only two Jews who talked about being Jews and loved it and, you know, didn't expect any bad stuff to come for that.
		And I know her and we talked about it and it never occurred to me not to.
		Talk about being Jewish.
		I was proud of it.
		But it's the kind of thing that was covered by a lot of fear or a lot of not being candid.
		You know, there were lots of actors in the earlier years who were Jewish who wouldn't admit it.
		Which I think is kind of silly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So, we could go in all ways to start, but why don't we do a little bio first, because everybody knows you from, obviously, Jaws, and Close Encounters, and What About Bob, et cetera, et cetera.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But can you give me a little bit of a bio, because that'll kind of connect us to the book, because you have a sort of interesting childhood related to politics in terms of where you're at now.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I was...
		I was born in Brooklyn to a very activist family.
		My great-aunt assassinated Czar Alexander in 1881, an act which I'm very proud of.
		And my grandmother was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and walked away from that catastrophe and went directly to the Socialist Party headquarters and volunteered and eventually became Eugene Debs' private secretary.
		And I have always been their child and my mother's child.
		And I once asked my mom, why were you a socialist and not a communist?
		And she said, better doughnuts.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is that a fact?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		That's a fact.
		That's a fact.
		And we lived in Queens, in an area in Queens which was completely left-wing.
		Completely socialist and communist.
		And the guy who was the head of the Communist Party on Long Island was a big fat hospital administrator named David, and he used to tell me stories about what it was like to, you know, be a part of the American Communist Party.
		And most of the stories dealt in how silly and stupid they were.
		And he's talking as a present-day communist.
unidentified		Right, right.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		He thought they were just, that his group was particularly silly.
		And he was always telling me these stories because this is what America was so frightened of.
		And there was, my father was asked, my father was not a partisan.
		And he, he was asked to run for the board of education in Queens.
		We had crosses burned on our lawn and blah, blah.
		And so David called an executive cell meeting and all the top communists in Long Island met at his apartment and they went downstairs to the basement.
		And David said, OK, we're here to try to convince Norman Dreyfus to run for the Board of Education, but it can't be a communist movement.
		It can't be anything, you know, identified with us.
		So what do you think?
		How should we do this?
		And one guy said, well, I think we should do this.
		And another guy said, we should do that.
		And then another guy said, well, speaking as a non-communist, I'd like to... And everyone went, what?
unidentified		What?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		They just let him in because he was their pal Stanley.
		And Stanley walked downstairs with them.
		And he said that was the thing that everyone was so afraid of in the early fifties.
		So, um, and also, Something that I don't think my father really understood, because my father was the head of a Jewish gang in Brooklyn in the 30s, and every time his father would close the candy store and move a few blocks and reopen it, he had to fight, his gang had to fight the Irish and the Italian gang.
		And these were bloody fights, and these were sometimes to the death, like ripping out antennas from cars and sticking them in people's eyes.
		And this was Pete prior to the war.
		And then he went to the war with his enemies, and he, when they came back, and he had a violent war.
		And very dramatic.
		But when he came back, he came back not with enemies, but with brothers.
		Guys who'd been through this experience with him.
		And I don't think that he realized that his former enemies were now his best friends and neighbors.
		And I remember talking to one of his friends who was Italian.
		And I said, I get it, I get it.
		Your totalitarian psychopath is better than his totalitarian psychopath.
unidentified		Exactly, exactly.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I laughed myself sick, and so did he.
		And he laughed so much that his milk spilled up through his nose.
		So, I found at a very early age That most of the partisanship in American politics was nonsense.
		And I've always felt that way.
		I certainly, I was at the very most, I was a Democrat.
		At the height of my partisan politics, I was a Democrat or a liberal, but I wasn't really And would never have voted a straight party ticket.
		And so when I started in my career talking about this stuff, I would always say that I was not a liberal.
		That I was a libo, conservo, rato, middle-of-the-road-o.
		Just like most of you, you just haven't given it enough thought lately.
		And I hold to that to this day.
		And I think that most, by reducing our politics to this bitter and ignorant partisanship, we do ourselves vast disservices.
		And we should know better.
		And nowadays, Republicans or conservatives can't wait to bring up The word liberal as a curse word and vice versa.
		Democrats do the same thing with conservatives.
		And the fact is, none of us are a straight ticket country.
		We don't do things like that.
		And we should know more.
		One of the simple reasons for knowing civics is that you know from the get go, from the beginning.
		That opposing views are meant to be cherished.
		And if you don't, you are missing out on something that is a remarkable strength to our system.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's supposed to be a liberal value.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's supposed to be an American value.
		So it's not just liberals.
		It's conservatives too.
		And we got so far away from that in such a short amount of time that this is all post-60s.
		And it's done, it was accomplished by what I call the James Dean generation.
		The ones who were too old to take acid with me.
		And too young to help their fathers in World War II.
		And they were without mission.
		They were stuck in nothingness.
		And like in the Dean film, you know, he was always yelling, you're tearing me apart.
		Things were being demanded of him that tore him apart.
		And when Brando did The Wild One, He was asked, what are you rebelling against?
		And Brando said, what have you got?
		And that's our tradition, our most immediate tradition.
		And by not knowing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, by not knowing the birth tale of America, We cheat ourselves tremendously, and we change the values that are so important and so unique to us.
		Opposing views.
		What other country cherishes opposing views like we do?
		One country does, and that's the country that says, my right honorable opponent.
		When they talk in Parliament in Britain, They always address their worst enemy with the most respect.
		And that's the tradition that we came from.
		And for us to deny that, or for us to walk away from that, or feel in some way compelled for either side, conservative or liberal, to have to put down the other side, It's not enough to disagree with people.
		You are called upon to put them down personally.
		There are people who wouldn't consider it a good day if they hadn't put down some liberals as idiots.
		And the fact is, they're not idiots.
		And we are not idiots.
		And the American political philosophy of A Republican democracy is not an idiotic thing.
		It's a brilliant discovery.
		And we changed the world.
		And we lost the pride of that.
		And we've reduced the pride of that system to the partisanship of the Republicans or the Democrats.
		George Washington said a very, very important thing.
		He said that the Constitution must always be central and the parties must always be peripheral.
		And we're living in the exact opposite world now.
		And that means that you're not a good conservative unless you're putting down the Democrats.
		And vice versa.
		You're not a good Democrat unless you're putting down conservative philosophy.
		And that's nonsense.
		And it's horseshit.
		And we should grow up and stop it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me pause you there for a moment, because I don't know how familiar you are with what I do here, but really what you're discussing is really why I started this show and what I've been trying to do for many years.
		As a Brooklyn-born guy who grew up in Long Island, lived in a crazy L.A.
		for eight years, and now I'm in the free state of Florida, my life That is actually very much in line with what you're talking about right there.
		But I want to just jump back to the communist thing for a moment because I think that'll sort of help frame why you care so much about the founding documents and all of those things.
		Do you think that maybe in the 50s or earlier when these people were avowed communists in the United States, and it's hard for people of a younger generation To kind of understand that, but really they were communists and they had meetings in basements and things like that.
		Do you think to sort of give the devil his due on that, that they felt that the system could work enough that it would actually make sense?
		As opposed to now, let's say, where I think a lot of people think the system no longer functions in a way so that Well, let me put it this way.
		over everything wouldn't work, but like your parents, did they feel that there was a way that you could exercise
		enough control over this system that it would be functional and genuinely help people?
		Would that be a fair estimation?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Well, let me put it this way.
		All during the 50s, all during the time when we were so passionate, either opposed to or in favor of communism,
		that feeling was not an informed and educated feeling.
		It was a feeling that people gained from their poverty, from the history of their poverty, both in the old countries and here.
		And they were not looking to destroy the American system.
		They were part of a legitimate What's the word?
		They were American communists within a system that accommodated American communism.
		And America was strong enough and confident enough that they could say, sure, be a communist, who cares?
		Because it's not going to take over our system.
		And that was something that people so easily forgot.
		So quickly.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Is that is that what strikes you as as most the starkest difference between the say sort of self-proclaimed communists or socialists of today where it really is sort of let's burn it down as opposed to let's operate within the system?
		Something like that.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		I think I think that if you are aware of the history of American labor or middle class development or anything, you're going to know that America was strong enough to accommodate a legal communist system, communist party, from the very beginning.
		It never once was attacked as illegitimate.
		The attack was Like, extra.
		They didn't even include the legitimate party, the Communist Party.
		They just attacked that weird entity known as Communism, and it was an international something ghost-like craziness.
		And Stalin gave them good reason to fear them.
		And the guys that I knew who were communists were always communists because of domestic reasons.
		Because of the depression.
		Because of lack of work.
		And things like that.
		They were not educated to international, you know, Marxism, etc.
		And that stuff can be pretty easily dispensed with.
		You know, you don't have to read Marcuse.
		To understand that it's illegit, you know, and it's too bad that it wasn't allowed to just duke, you know, have a duke out, an intellectual debate between communism and it's like the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate that they had.
		That was important.
		That was an important thing.
		And it actually really made a difference.
		Nixon stood up for commodities and private enterprise and like that.
		And Khrushchev wanted to nail him to a wall.
		Too bad.
		He could have learned something.
		And to turn over a country as big as Russia and turn it over completely to a bunch of apparatchniks that didn't know anything about the industries they were running, not a good thing.
		And ultimately it was going to fail.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Sort of sounds a little bit like what we have now with a lot of people that are running things that don't know exactly what they're doing.
		So you mentioned that you would describe yourself in sort of different ways.
		You obviously became A-list Hollywood star for several decades.
		But Hollywood is known as this, you know, sort of lefty, socialist, whatever place.
		They're not too kind to some of the ideas that you're writing certainly about in this book, about civics and pride in America and things like that.
		I know you think it's, well I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you believe it's affected your career later.
		But do you think it affected your career early on?
		I mean, there was obviously a tremendous amount of success there.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		You mean, was I frightened by its negative effect on me?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Never.
		Yeah, by not just jumping in and, yes, I'm just like you guys on everything.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		No, it never occurred to me to be like that.
		It never occurred to me that I would be hurt by it.
		And when I have friends who are on the other side, who are, you know, conservative writers and such, who say that they've been blacklisted, I like to turn to my friend Lionel Chetwin and say, Lionel, you have not been out of work since Hanoi Hilton.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You're always working.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Don't tell me you've been blacklisted.
		And I think that there's a kind of romance to being blacklisted, so you want in on that.
		But we play fast and loose.
		With our insults and pejoratives.
		And we don't explain enough.
		I think that there's more books that come out recently that are written by conservatives who call liberals traitors.
		Basically traitors.
		And that's crazy.
		And liberals who do the same thing about conservatives are nuts.
		And they should control themselves.
		And one of the things about civics is that you learn how to be civil.
		And that's a controlled way of communication.
		And if you can do that, you can always come out on top.
		If you reduce all discussions to yelling and screaming and interrupting, you lose.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Do you sense that part of that is because the culture has gone so askew?
		I try not to blame all the politicians all the time for how screwy everything seems, because they're just a function of us.
		And culturally, at an educational level, we don't teach a lot of these things.
		We don't teach civics that well.
		Our education, obviously public education, Ain't great, to say the least.
		The stuff that now comes out of Hollywood and through big tech and everything else, it's often very slanted.
		We're having like a cultural crisis in a way that then leads to the political dilemma that you're talking about.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		I don't know whether it's the egg or the chicken.
		I don't know which comes first.
		I do know that Hollywood has a liberal reputation And I always cringe when I watch the Oscars and wait for some beautiful, talented actress to say something stupid about some issue.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		To tell us that we're all racist, now come to my movie.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
		And it's kind of silly.
		And it should be seen as silly.
		It should not be seen as, I hate her, I'll never talk to her, and I'll never go to her movies.
		And they take it far too seriously in that way.
		And conservatives make it far too serious when they were in the 50s, when all the owners of the companies were way over to the right.
		And they would hire liberals to write their scripts.
		And they created a picture of America in small-town, Andy Hardy ways that was beautiful and very persuasive.
		And they had no women, no blacks, no Jews, nothing.
		It was a Protestant, small-town America.
		It was as wrong-headed as you can get.
		But that's okay, as long as you let the other side have its say.
		Let the conservatives have their say.
		And the conservatives do not have to be Ayn Rand.
		They can be small-town America.
		And one of my favorite films is the Oxbow Incident.
		And that's the story of a town that goes mad and hangs the wrong guys.
		And at the end of that film, when the sheriff comes and says, he's not dead, he's at his ranch.
		And anyone who participated in this is going to be up for murder.
		And that's the whole town.
		And it's a complex thing.
		Nothing is so simple.
		And for us to make the claim that politics can be simple, it's not fair.
		It's not right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, do you find that there's a bit of an asymmetry in the way, if you want to sort of be above the fray, but the way each side might treat you?
		If I'm not mistaken, I think in 2015 you were spotted at the back of a Ted Cruz rally or something like that and people started calling you all these...
		All of these awful names and you're a crazy right winger and you know, all of this stuff.
		And I remember seeing that, I think on YouTube or something, thinking I didn't know anything about your politics beforehand.
		It didn't matter to me.
		You're a great actor.
		I happen to, you know, now I really like Ted Cruz.
		I didn't like him as much at the moment, but OK, you were just in the back of the room.
		If I can picture the video again.
		But that a certain side went crazy on you, but had it been the other way around, had you shown up to say a Hillary Clinton rally, I don't know that you would have got hate.
		That it's not exactly equal.
		I get the idea that you want to be above the craziness, but right now it does seem to me, and I wrote my whole first book was a defense of liberalism, of classical liberalism.
		It does seem to me there is an asymmetry that we're all struggling with right now, in terms of how each side behaves.
		Not to say that the conservatives don't have, they're bad actors too.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		I think if you can start out by thinking that one side is inherently better than the other, that it is more easy to perceive the morality of the GOP as opposed to the Democrats, then you're nuts.
		Because they're all equally nuts.
		The Democrats are, and so are the Republicans.
		And what happened in that year was that I simply went to the Republican caucus in Iowa to watch.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You crazy radical!
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		And it was, what's his name, the guy that you mentioned.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Ted Cruz.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		No, no, not Ted Cruz.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't Ted Cruz.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It had nothing to do with that.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't Ted Cruz?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Who was it?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		No, it was... Was it Rubio?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		No, it wasn't a candidate.
		He was a columnist, a commentator.
		And you just mentioned him at the beginning of the interview.
		He outed me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		He outed me.
		He wrote a column about what was Richard Dreyfuss doing at the Iowa caucuses.
		And then the liberals went crazy.
		And all of my friends and associates just couldn't leave it alone.
		And my son, who at that time was quite young, he wrote A piece that was on the internet where he was saying, why is my actor father in a position to give lessons in ethics to America?
		And so, what's her name?
		Megan Kelly invited us on her show when she was still with Fox.
		So the two of us went on.
		And for me, it was simply, if you're a smart person, you scrutinize, you read everything.
		You don't read what reinforces your already assumed habits.
		And, you know, I hold Being a high school history teacher to be just about second to being an actor.
		An actor is the best thing on earth to do.
		Unless you're a high school history teacher.
		And then I would say, how many kids here in this room have the same politics as their parents?
		And whatever number of hands goes up, I say, for this semester, you take the opposite view.
		Under compulsion, you do not agree with your parents, and I don't care.
		I want you to disagree with your parents on every paper.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Parents must have really loved this.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it never happened, so I never got to know.
		And I watched.
		I graduated in 65.
		By 69, There were kids who had the legal right to get up and leave any class that they just disagreed with.
		Well, that's stupid.
		That's a stupid thing to do.
		You don't turn over the future of your country to people who are making life decisions when they're 16 and a half.
unidentified		No.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		In retrospect, knowing that, what the 16 and a half year olds were doing, you know, in 69, now these people are running the country, I mean, I guess this isn't shocking, where we're at, huh?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		No, it isn't.
		You're right, because what happened was that it was the generation that took power after the 60s.
		They were the 70 to 72 school board members.
		They're the ones who thought That they were smart enough to tell the founding fathers to take a hike and not educate.
		You know, we came up with a unique system.
		And it was unique.
		And we said, we will educate you to this system.
		And then you are obligated to pass it on to your kids.
		And that was serious business.
		And we did that.
		And that didn't guarantee a Republican future or a Democratic future.
		It said that both sides had something to offer.
		And if you did, for instance, I would always say as a history buff, I would say there's no such thing as one great history.
		There's always at least two that can, you know, oppose one another.
		And if you don't see the advantage to that, then slow down and shut up and listen more.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Are you hopeful that we'll get there?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		I am pretty convinced that we are in the last stages of of the ability for America to survive.
		We are in an endgame right now, and that is not a liberal endgame or a conservative endgame.
		It's a combination of both, and we are without mercy, and we are without forgiveness.
		And we have to, we have to rethink that.
		We have to get it back into the earliest years of public schools so that your civic education is complete by high school graduation.
		It has nothing to do with college or university.
		And the more you explore that, the more you'll see why that's simple and commonsensical.
		And the founders knew Everyone had to be educated to a certain kind of participatory citizenship.
		And they knew that.
		It had nothing to do with those who could afford to go on to university.
		That was creating exactly why they had left the British Empire.
		So, if they had some informed pride, they should be as proud as punch to give their youngest of their young a real grounding in civics.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So it's interesting because I talk about a lot on the show how we are at this moment, what you're describing as an end game.
		We seem to be at a moment in the country where we can basically go two ways at this point.
		We can either figure out how to, you know, maintain ourselves as the United States of America, Or the states really just kinda need to go their separate ways, and that's sort of what federalism's about in the first place.
		But then what makes us united, and will we end up in perpetual civil war?
		And, you know, there's a litany of problems with that.
		So describe what Endgame, I mean, Endgame can go two ways, right?
		Endgame can be we end up in just utter chaos, or there is something that comes after Endgame that's positive, right?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully, I suppose.
		If you believe that you have to find that which we share and not that which divides us, we should be proud of opposing views.
		We should be proud of having dissent.
		And they have always been the hallmarks of America.
		Always.
		Until so recently that People don't understand what history itself is.
		But that's what you've got to fight.
		You don't have a choice between having the United States and having chaos.
		Because that's not a choice.
		It may be fatal.
		It may be the worst possible thing that could happen to us.
		But what we should be doing is agreeing on the need for civics.
		And when I went to the Wall Street Journal, I was so shocked that they wouldn't endorse civics for everyone.
		And they said, they implied to me that they thought that liberal teachers in civics had a hidden agenda.
		And I said, a hidden agenda in civics?
		Yeah.
		I said, you're nuts.
		You're crazy.
		There's no such thing as a hidden agenda in the teaching of civics.
		You either have honest history or you don't.
		You either lie your way through history or you don't.
		And you are willing to tell the truth.
		And if you tell the truth about the Bill of Rights, why is the Bill of Rights called the Bill of Rights?
		Why is it in the Constitution in a way that none of the other amendments are?
		And there's a reason.
		And there's a reason that breeds pride and breeds love of country.
		You don't have to be in the military to have love of country.
		You have to know why Nathan Hale died.
		You have to know why George Washington tried to throw the coin across the river.
		And you know those stories, and you'll know who you are.
		And without them, you don't know who you are.
		I may say that, I will say that, when we divide up between commentators that are conservative, commentators that are liberal, we're reducing American politics and American government and American history to an anecdote.
		And it's nonsense.
		Nonsense!
		Because there's no such thing as a pure conservative or a pure liberal.
		And we always are borrowing and exchanging positions and using the positions of your opponents.
		We're always doing that.
		And should.
		And that's what's so great about living here.
		People who come from overseas, they don't go to Norway.
		They don't say, oh, I can't wait to get to Norway.
		I can't wait to get to Uganda.
		They can't wait to get to America because America is the only country that offers them the opportunity to have opportunity.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Nobody leaves.
		Forget who's coming.
		Nobody leaves.
		That's the weird one.
		I want to end with one thing that can sort of connect your love of history and civics and clearly America to what we know, the career that we all know.
		And how that sort of is relating to Hollywood these days.
		It seems like I can go on Apple movies every day and literally I'll just scroll and scroll and scroll and I can't find anything new that is interesting to me.
		It's almost impossible.
		It feels like the studios are out of ideas.
		We remake and we reboot and we retread and now the studios have all come together
		and so there's just not a plethora of ideas anymore.
		And I end up watching the same, I actually watched What About Bob
		about two weeks ago on a Sunday.
		I end up watching the same things that I was always watching
		for most of my life as a child of the 80s and the 90s.
		Do you think Hollywood can shift to help with some of this?
		That there could be some stories?
		I mean, there's plenty of stories from our past that could help us understand some of this better.
		We used to be able to tell them, but we don't seem to be able to tell them anymore.
		Or maybe it's not Hollywood that should be doing it.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's not just Hollywood.
		That's true.
		But I have found that there's a whole series of books By Howard Fast and others who I've wanted to turn into films.
		And I've been told, no, no, that's agitprop.
		That was communist agitprop.
		Are you crazy?
		You're talking about some book that was... He wrote Spartacus!
		That's a pro-communist book?
		What are you, nuts?
		And yet, that's how they were dismissed.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And... Didn't a lot of the guys who wrote that end up getting blacklisted in Hollywood?
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		They did.
		They were.
		And Howard was one of them.
		And I went to Howard and I said, when he was in his 90s, I said, I'm going to get your stuff done.
		I am.
		And then I had to come to him some 10 years later and say, I'm so sorry.
		But I still can't get you done.
		I can't get it done.
		People don't read what's in front of them.
		They read the rep.
		And I don't care anymore.
		And I don't want anyone to really care.
		If you're a communist and you've written a brilliant book like Animal Farm or 1984, Do you really think you're going to be poisoning the brains of your children by introducing them to 1984?
		Good grief!
		We have no sense of risk, and we have no trust in our children's brains.
		And that's a terrible, terrible flaw.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Richard, I don't think we can end on terrible, terrible flaw.
		We gotta end with something positive here.
		Help me bring this home.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Agree with me.
		All I want is you to agree with me.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course I agree with the premise that we gotta let go of some of this hate and we gotta stop.
		You know, I don't know how much you know about me, but I'm married to a man with two kids.
		I'm pro-choice.
		And people write about me all day long what a far-right conservative I am.
		So I get it.
		These labels make no sense.
		We're all an amalgamation of a million different ideas.
		I'm someone born in New York, only lived in New York and L.A.
		my entire life until the last year in Florida, so I think I'm in some ways a living, breathing example of some of the stuff that you're talking about.
		Why did I come to Florida?
		For freedom!
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Well, I tell you, keep it up and And bring it up.
		Don't limit yourself to whatever your partisanship is.
		Because that's disaster.
		And you're more than your party affiliation.
		and you're more than your general.
		To stand up for what America introduced to the world in 1787 is not a small thing.
		And it took courage on the part of the country, and it took courage on the part of the public,
		and...
		And that's what's missing.
		We have no sense of pride, no sense of courage, no sense of risk.
		And we should.
		And we should do things that raise up such pride.
		And that means risking the brains of your children.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I often end the show by saying I have nothing better to do than save the world.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I sense that's your mission, too.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly my mission.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's really been a pleasure, Richard.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much for taking the time.
richard dreyfuss ▲ ● ▼		Thanks a lot.

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