Renowned actor Tim Robbins told comedian Russell Brand during a podcast interview aired over the weekend that his views about COVID-19 restrictions completely changed when Robbins visited parts of the world where people publicly asserted their right to be free from masking, and that lockdown enforcers’ coercion, sanctimony, and demonization of those with different views have fed an atmosphere of tribalism and repression that is dangerous for civil society.
In conversation with Brand on the Dec. 18 episode of the comedian’s podcast, Robbins also voiced his dismay at official policies based on limited scientific studies that discouraged patterns of behavior that might have led to herd immunity, and thus arguably slowed the world’s emergence from the pandemic.
Change of Perspective
Robbins began the interview by recounting how he was originally on the side of those who advocated for strict COVID-19 measures such as masking, social distancing, and lockdowns, requiring people to minimize or end indoor activities. He agreed so strongly in principle with a vigorous response to the outbreak that he felt some anger toward participants in a protest against such measures in Orange County, California, Robbins recalled.Then as he began to travel more widely, Robbins increasingly came into contact with people who disagreed with the harsh policies, first in certain U.S. states, and then during a visit to the United Kingdom for work.
“It wasn’t until much later that I started to have questions. When I saw that there wasn’t a huge death rate here [in Britain], I started to wonder about what we were being told and whether it was true or not,” he said.
Robbins recalled hearing noises on the street outside his hotel room in London’s SoHo neighborhood one day and coming to the realization that an anti-lockdown protest was underway. He went outside and mingled with the demonstrators, not because he necessarily agreed with their views but out of curiosity about who they were and what message they sought to convey.
To his surprise, Robbins found that the characterizations of such protestors he had read in the mainstream media were totally off.
“I saw the way that they were being described in the press, and it wasn’t true. These were not National Front Nazis, these were liberals and lefties and people that believed in personal freedom, and I began to educate myself and I began to open my mind to what was going on,” Robbins recalled.
Robbins contrasted the environment in the United Kingdom, where he saw a fairly high level of tolerance of different viewpoints and attitudes toward coping with the pandemic, with the severely politicized climate in America. Things got so bad at home that people could practically guess one another’s party affiliation based on willingness to undergo vaccination and submit to lockdowns, and any difference of opinion quickly led to one’s tarring as the enemy, he recalled.
“It was a very different political environment in the United States, very divisive, very much based on politics. At first, if you were a Democrat when Trump was president, you weren’t going to take that vaccine because it was Trump’s vaccine, and then, that seemed to somehow change. It was kind of Orwellian,” Robbins reflected.
“Now , we were thinking about it a different way, and if you didn’t take the vaccine, you were a Republican. It wasn’t that way here in England, there was a much more tolerant attitude towards the diversity of opinion, so I was really grateful to have been in this experience so that I could get a different perspective,” he continued.
Robbins went on to recall that the lockdowns went on for so long that he began to question whether they had a more solid basis in science or alarmism. The revision of official definitions of what is a vaccine was particularly suspect, he recalled.
Official About-Face
The decision of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to adjust its protocol regarding virus outbreaks spurred further reflections on Robbins’s part. In the past, the longstanding policy had been to take care of the elderly and vulnerable and limit their exposure as much as possible, while allowing others to carry on with their normal activities in order to develop herd immunity.But COVID-19 gave U.S. officials carte blanche to implement measures of social coercion and control that limited how everybody, including the healthiest and most-able bodies members of society as well as the young, was allowed to live.
“We turned into tribal, angry, vengeful people, and I don’t think that’s something that is sustainable for the earth, that we start demonizing people that don’t agree with our particular health policies and turn them into monsters, turn them into pariahs, and say that they don’t deserve a hospital bed,” Robbins said.
The hardening of the attitudes of lockdown proponents went so far that, when faced with any disagreement, they began to show an indifference and even contempt for the lives of those with different viewpoints.
“I think about people that have made bad mistakes in their lives, where they take too many drugs and they overdose. That’s totally their choice, that’s totally their responsibility. Yet we take care of them, yet we bring them to the hospital, yet we save their lives, because we’re compassionate, because we want to make sure that people live. And this turned, it turned into ‘You should [expletive] die because you have not complied.' That’s incredibly dangerous,” Robbins said.
