Name: Rob Schneider: Here’s What’s Wrong With Our Culture Today
Uploaded: 2026-01-06T19:05:09.000Z
Description: “COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider. For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth seeking, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can understand that, if you accidentally watch it.

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

I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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