Evan Sayet, a comedian who wrote for both Bill Maher and Donald Trump, argues the political left's "long march through the institutions" since the 1960s has successfully brainwashed society by operating as a party of negation rather than affirmation. He contends that Hollywood rejects patriotic stories to avoid offending audiences, yet he remains optimistic about Trump's 2016 and 2024 victories, comparing them to D-Day and V-E Day. Ultimately, Sayet proposes an "Adopt a Democrat" strategy where conservatives convert non-fanatics individually, suggesting the only path forward is for sane people to join Republicans while leaving moderates behind as the left's vitriol replaces humor. [Automatically generated summary]
First good sign before I left for the Capitol, I had my staff collect and print out This list of almost 60 different insulting epithets that the president has said about me.
I say I'm in the conservative thought industry, so I sell my thoughts in a wide variety of ways, sometimes humorous, sometimes not so humorous, but always now in an attempt to be on the right side of things.
What's going on in the world of conservative thought these days?
It seems to me that most sane people are basically conservatives at this point, that there's kind of a wide tent conservative thing happening, and that's what most of us are, whether we like the C word or not.
Well, you have to go back to the 60s radicals and their attempt to violently overthrow Western civilization and this country.
They declared war.
They literally declared war.
Bernadine Dorn, the wife of William Ayers, founder of the...
And they tried to foment revolution.
The problem was they couldn't get anybody to join them.
The problem was even though back then there really were some real and serious wrongs and oppressions, Jim Crow, segregation.
Even then, the people who were being oppressed still recognized they had it better in America than they had it anywhere else because they knew the world.
Many of them were first or second generation immigrants.
Others had just come back from World War II and seen what the rest of the world is like.
And in one of my books, I think The Woke Supremacy, I tell a story about Muhammad Ali, the boxer Muhammad Ali, who went to fight a fight in Africa.
And rather than setting up training camp here in America to be supportive, he set up camp there and spent a month there.
And when he came back, they said, Mohammed, what did you think of Africa?
And he said, quote, thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.
Remember, this is not only a black man from the Jim Crow South.
At this point, he converted to Islam.
This was a black Muslim man from the Jim Crow South.
And still, he recognized that as many...
Injustices that still needed to be fought, America was still a far greater place than any place else in the world.
So they couldn't get people to join their revolution.
They went underground and they went on what's called the long march through the institutions.
Slowly over time, they became the powers that be in academia and journalism, education and entertainment.
And they used the institutions to brainwash successive generations into being those warriors that they couldn't get earlier because they were educated by the real world.
So, Mark Rudd, one more thing, and I don't mean to filibuster.
Mark Rudd, who was one of those original radicals, a bloodthirsty, horrible human being, said the true flowering of the 60s, the 60s revolution, will come in the 90s when we've taken over the institutions.
Well, he was wrong only because he missed the obvious.
Once they'd taken over the institutions, they'd need one more generation to then use those institutions to create their warriors.
So, Dave, if it's 30 years from the 60s to the 90s, what's 30 years from the 90s?
We've cleansed the schools and the entertainment industry of the last of the remaining generations and that countervailing influence, but also natural attrition.
The older generation, the last of the great generations passed on, and we were...
We were remiss in fighting back because things were so easy, things were so good, that we could be this open-minded because nothing bad could happen to America.
I'm a little bit older than you are, but I think you saw this time in America as well, where it was forever going to be.
America was forever going to be prosperous.
America was always going to be safe.
America was never going to be challenged.
And thus...
If there are no consequences to being wrong, we didn't stand up enough for what's right.
So, as a guy that's gone through Hollywood, and you worked for Bill Maher, actually, on Politically Incorrect, and you've done some stuff with Letterman over the years, you've been around the block, you've also written for Donald Trump, I mean, you've really had quite a resume here.
I do believe, I'm just so hyped up, I'm so happy to be with you, but I do believe when Maher went to the White House the other day, I'm probably the only person in the entire world who's written for both Maher and Trump.
Whether that bodes well for your future in the industry, I can't tell you.
So as someone that's been through the entertainment side of things and through politics and everything else, what do you make of this moment we're in right now where these things seemingly have collided into each other and there's very little distinction between politics and comedy, which I guess gets a guy like Bill Maher at the White House in the first place.
And so you no longer need to have this general audience where everybody sits down together, everybody watches the same thing, that the politics has become atomized as well.
Very little chance that...
One of my ideological cohorts is going to be watching the Stephen Colbert show.
Conversely, very little chance that one of my ideological opponents is going to be watching Gutfeld.
Yeah, I would imagine, though, at some level, Trump, because of his, like, comedy chops, I guess you would say, in some sense it must have been a little bit fun, even if he was kind of ad-libbing off your stuff, to watch him operate in that way.
So we're at this strange cultural moment, and the good libs, or the old-school libs, as you described, I think mostly are Republicans.
What do you think can happen?
I mean, the last couple weeks on my show, we've been covering it pretty extensively, just the absolute descent into madness that has happened with the left, and they have no leader anymore.
The Democrat Party seems to be an absolute freefall.
Will they hand this thing to the true radicals?
Do they somehow bring in a moderate to make any...
What do you want to happen and what do you think will happen?
The problem with the political left is that they are not for anything.
Believing in things, being for something, causes disagreements, fighting, and war.
So the only way to live in a world where there's nothing to kill or die for, if you want to go to when John Lennon took this ideology and put it to song, in order for there to be nothing to kill or die for, there has to be nothing to live for.
There has to be nothing positive.
And this is one thing, when I first walked into my first Republican meeting, post-World War, post-World War II, no, post-911.
But post-11 and the response of the political left, the idea that we deserved it, that it was the chickens coming home to roost, that the way to prevent further attacks was to be nicer to the terrorists.
Well, this was insane to me.
And so I had to think, if this is how liberals, if this is what people who are called liberals believe, then am I really a liberal?
And Dave, I have an expression, the first time you think is the last time you're a Democrat.
And so when I walked into a Republican meeting for the first time, I heard something I'd never heard before.
I heard people who could argue in the affirmative for the things they believe.
They could tell you why they believe, what they believe, how it works, where it has worked in the past.
Whereas you never hear anything in the affirmative from the political left.
You only hear, he's a Nazi, he's a fascist, he's a homophobe, he's a xenophobe, so vote for us by default.
And when that no longer works, and I believe they have so overused it, when that no longer works, they have nothing to say because there's nothing that they're for.
They're against the police.
They're against the border.
They're against protecting children.
They are the party of negation.
And once that doesn't work, once they can't scare them with us.
It's over for them.
The problem is this.
There's so much damage that has been left in their wake that we have generation upon generation that is literally miserable.
No, and ultimately what needs to happen is for every sane person to come over to become a Republican, we then split in half and we become the conservatives.
Because people misunderstand and they get angry.
We are not the conservative party.
We are the Republican party.
Which means when they call people rhinos, they're not rhinos, they're just not conservatives.
And what eventually will have to happen is that the...
Those they call the RINOs, the more moderate non-conservatives, will go back and become the equivalent of the Democrat Party, just like they used to be.
At the soul, though, we cannot have a party with any chance of power that hates America.
We cannot have a party that is so desperate to show that nothing is true, that science is wholly irrelevant to them.
Men can't have babies.
We can't have a party that embraces our enemies because they so despise us that they would rather march on the sweet queers for Palestine than to wave an American flag.
But I think we've gotten to a point now where those people like Bill Maher...
Put aside his personal dislike for Trump, well, Trump's likely to be running in four years.
When all these people have come over to our side, our side will split into two and will return to the two equal parties, one of which is more to the left than the other.
It was far less crazy because the woke movement hadn't yet so totally metastasized and ossified that there was no alternative voice to be found in academia.
There was no alternative voice to be found in mainstream media.
There was no alternative.
So it is crazier now because the crazies have solidified their hold on the political left.
It's also crazier because the craziness is more instantly delivered and it's impossible to escape.
There's concern that if the left leaves us no alternative, then the only alternative is the far right.
And that scares me more than if we split up and go back to how it had been, which are people with similar base values who have differences in matters of degree.
Oh, we should tax more and have a bigger safety net.
We should tax less.
But there was never, is America evil?
Do we need to destroy and then rebuild some utopian premise that only exists, as in the John Lennon song, in the imagination?
But I don't worry about...
I'll tell you why.
The best piece of advice I ever got was from our friend David Horowitz.
Well, then my next question is going to be a little bizarre, but because you're also a Hollywood guy, I mean, what do you think?
So I was going to ask you kind of what the future, it's funny you said future, because I was going to ask you what you think the future of Hollywood is, but maybe a better way to phrase it then in light of what you said is, do you think Hollywood, was it ever...
Was it destined that it was going to get this out of control, in some sense, for some of the reasons that you described?
Like, that the radicals, when they took over the institutions of Hollywood, was easily going to fall because it's really just a money-making machine and all of the parts are replaceable.
The greatest actor is still replaceable, so it would be very easy to just decimate it the way it's been decimated.
And where, when I was 13, go to the movie theater and there were 10 movies I wanted to see, and now I haven't seen a new movie in three years.
Well, it's hard to think that when Disney keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.
I mean, I realized years ago when Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ, at that moment, every studio should have been making a faith-based movie.
And even to this day, they're not.
You know, maybe that's throwing it off to one of their ancillary companies, but instead you have to have Angel Studios making it and raking in the dough, and still they're not doing it.
So I don't think, I think that they are so convinced that they are offering us a utopia, and the utopia that they are offering requires for there to be no God, be no patriotism, be no...
Personal possessions except theirs.
Because only when everything is nothing is there nothing to kill or die for.
Nobody became quite as big, but there was a time when Dreesen was the single most televised comedian of all because he was so well-crafted and so mainstream in those possible ways that there was no show he didn't do.
Well, because everything on the political left, and actually it was David Horowitz who made this point as well, everything on the political left is for the revolution.
And even though they don't recognize, many of them, the rank and file, you know, and this is my real claim to fame as a conservative.
Thinker is what people call the unified theory of liberalism and why it is that so many good, smart, decent, loving, caring, generous people ignore fact and reason and side always with evil.
How do you look at the Middle East and decide the problem isn't the homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic Islamic fascists?
The problem's that tiny liberal democracy of Jews.
How do you look at what went down in Ferguson, Missouri?
They decide the problem isn't this career thug high on drugs who just strong-armed a local businessman.
The problem is the white racist cop.
How do you get it so completely wrong?
And the reason they do is because thinking was outlawed in the 1980s.
Because thinking is now seen as an act of bigotry.
Indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because discrimination is...
Homophobia, xenophobia, all these things.
So in order to eliminate discrimination, they must be utterly indiscriminate.
So many of them are so miserable because they have nothing in their lives.
They've been told, you know, no countries, no religions, so they don't have God, they don't have patriotism, they don't have friends because they have no meaningful basis for a friendship, they don't have parents because their parents are their best friends.
They don't have heroes because every hero is now an anti-hero.
And they are so miserable that they are desperately searching.
So it's not like you have to pluck them from the cult camp and knock the Kool-Aid out of their hands.
They've turned and they're running towards us.
What we have to do is be there and be capable of answering the questions when the time comes.
That's why people like Jordan Peterson.
They're searching.
It's why Ben Shapiro, it's why you, it's why so many of these people who five years ago, if they knew who they were, it was under the covers where nobody would see them doing it.
Now they're coming out to the TPUSA gatherings.
They're coming out, they're searching.
And so they are searching.
That's half of our job.
The other half is to be able to provide them with thoughtful, articulate answers.
Well, that I think we've gotten pretty good at explaining ourselves.
I think the rest is just getting them.
I talked about it on my show earlier this week.
I mean, it's getting over what I did a video for PragerU called the bravery deficit and just be a little bit braver and wake up and then they get on their way.
And then I suppose you're bullish on the future that we'll be able to make creative things again and comedy can come back.
And how about some new music or a movie that might be new?
Indeed, I am bullish, but again, I thought of Trump's victory in 2016 as D-Day.
It didn't win the war for us, but had we lost it, the war was over.
I thought of his victory in 2024 as V-E Day.
I think that the fever blister of wokeism...
But now there's a Europe and a world that has been decimated, that needs almost the equivalent of an ideological, intellectual, and artistic martial plan.
We need to be aggressive.
And so the one thing I will suggest to the layman, because you and I have a different platform...
To reach more people than the layman does.
But we don't have to convince everybody.
We have to convince one person each.
What I say is that they own the media.
At least they did until recently.
We own the truth.
That means they can hit a million people at once with their lies.
We have to be a million people telling the truth to one person at a time.
And so I have a program I call Adopt a Democrat.
I find one person in your life who you know is not a left-wing fanatic.
He hasn't read Das Kapital and is a Marxist.
He just has never heard from a conservative what a conservative believes.
And a mistake that we make, Dave, is we try to win the argument right there and then because it's so obvious how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how opposite of good writing and truthful they are, that we think we could just...
No, it's like raising a child.
You plant the seed.
You don't make everything a teachable moment.
And over time, you will convert people.
I've converted them.
You've converted them.
And just one more point.
Think about this.
If we all change one person, we double our numbers.