Ask Dr. Drew - Actor Canceled For Refusing COVID-19 Vaccine: Clifton Duncan vs. Pandemic Mandates – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 115

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Clifton Duncan is an award-winning actor & self-described "pot-smoking, pro-choice atheist" who says his burgeoning acting career was cancelled when he refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19 – including the loss of his manager and the prospect of a five-figure weekly salary.  “I refuse to allow any employer or, by extension, the government to act as my health care provider and to dictate what I inject into my body,” Clifton says. “I refused to be bullied or coerced or shamed into taking a medical product I neither want or need.” Clifton Duncan graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from New York University’s Graduate Acting Program and appeared in critically-acclaimed productions on and off-Broadway. His TV slate includes work for NBC, Fox, CBS and Starz. Follow him at https://twitter.com/cliftonaduncan and listen to the Clifton Duncan Podcast.  MEDICAL NOTE: The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. Hundreds of millions of people have received a COVID-19 vaccine, and serious adverse reactions are rare. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (http://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. SPONSORED BY • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get 10% off with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew GEAR PROVIDED BY • BLUE MICS - After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew's iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don't need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue's lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew's Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue • ELGATO - Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato's Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew's streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato's lights transformed Dr. Drew's set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome everyone. Today we're going to be speaking to Clifton Duncan. He is someone whom I don't even know where I saw him. He was giving a little presentation at a podium and I just said, I've got to speak to that journeys. I believe we have the following Wednesday set as well, Susan. Am I seeing Dr. Robert Malone? Is that interesting as well? So a lot of controversial figures we're going to interrogate, so to speak. The new book, Naomi Wolfscott, I know it's up here somewhere, but I can't see it, is really a pleasure to read, and I'm anxious to talk to her about it. It really is sort of a firsthand, almost like a diary account of what went down for her, and it's quite exemplary.

And I bring it up because Clifton has a similar story, I suspect. Cancellation. People that say cancellation is not a real thing, please listen to Clifton for a few minutes, and let's see what shows up. So let's get right to it. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. A psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor. Where the hell do you think I learned

that? I'm just saying you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop, and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. We'll be right back. matter your team, your favorite player, or your style. There's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season.

Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. And welcome, everyone.

We appreciate you all being here. Start off a new week. We are going to take calls today in addition of Twitter Spaces. And I believe Thursday is going to be exclusively calls. Is that correct, Susan? Or do we have a guess? No, it looks like just calls on Thursday. And tomorrow, the three hosts are not short on content.

So I don't think we'll be taking much calls tomorrow. I think we both have, all three of us have a lot to say. So I'm suspecting. But who knows? I may have a chance to get some callers tomorrow as well. Susan, you good? Yeah, I'm okay. Okay, okay. All right. Well, let's bring in our guest. Clifton is an actor.

He was silenced for having the temerity to go out and uh had questioned whether or not the rna vaccine was in his best interest i'm sure there's a whole story i really don't know the story and i'm anxious to hear it uh you can follow clifton caleb tell me where the twitter handle is we got it wrong on twitter spaces clifton. Duncan. I thought he said Clifton Duncan online. Did I not hear that? That's his Instagram.

Instagram. Okay. Clifton Duncan online is Instagram and Clifton A. Duncan on Twitter. And we're of course out on Rumble as well. I will watch the ranters there as I always do and all the trolls that show up. And we're monitoring you guys over on the restream.

So let's bring in Clifton. Afternoon, sir. Thank you for being here. Oh, it's a pleasure, Dr. Drew. I appreciate you having me here. So I literally watched about two minutes of you. It must have been a YouTube post or something at a podium. And I just went, I must speak to this man.

This is the guy I got to talk to. You were so dispassionate, so reasonable. And I thought this guy needs to be heard. I need to hear what he's got to say. I really didn't even listen to the rest of your speech. I wanted to hear it from your mouth in real time. And if this kind of request came out of nowhere, that's where it came from. I said, this is a guy that seems reasonable and we should be hearing what he has to say. So what happened to you? Yeah, it was a little unexpected. So the speech that you're referring to, I was asked to go and give some remarks to some of the incoming students at the Mises Institute, which is a libertarian sort of economics institute really based based in Austrian economics. And so it was just funny to me when I was asked, because as we all are aware, I'm an actor, and I had no idea what I was going

to say to these kids. And so I just decided to go with the story of how I got there in the first place. And I can't really dress it up or make it sound more exciting than it really is. I was doing my thing as an actor. I was based in New York City. Most of my work was in the theater. But around 2017, things began to really take off. I debuted on Broadway, did some major shows off-Broadway, did some great television work. I even did a play out in Pasadena, where you are. Playhouse.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, I mean, things were just going really, really well. And then the pandemic hit. And, you know, what's ironic about it, Drew, is that at the beginning, I was probably two or three months ahead of where everyone else was. In other words, while everyone else was enjoying Donald Trump's first impeachment, I was the one who was stocking up on canned goods and medical supplies. I still have nitrile gloves, as a matter of fact, from that binge buying I did. Even at that time, this was like maybe late January, early February of 2020. And it was already difficult to find surgical masks. But I was totally in. And I, you know, I was pestering my friends and loved ones with statistics and warnings and urging them to get prepared as well. This was back when everybody was saying, you know, it's just the

flu, brah. And I was one of the few people in New York City who was masking and gloving on the trains, receiving some derision because of it. So do you have any predictions for the future? Anything coming ahead for us? That was a pretty good call in January of 2020. Anything you guys should be aware of right now? Any stock tits? Well, I can't share any on air with you. I don't want to. Well, the irony of it is, though, Drew, it's about the flow of information, isn't it? It's where we get our information from. And what was funny is that the hashtag, it was like Fox News lied and people died. But the irony of that is that it was late January. I believe it was Senator Tom Cotton. I think it was Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfield,

one on the 26th and then the 28th and then the 29th of January, all respectively. They were talking about something happening in China. And I stopped watching television regularly a long time ago. And so I've been watching a lot of YouTube commentators. And it was those people who are often banned and censored who were saying something is happening. Now it's hit the Middle East. Now it's ripping through Italy and Spain and something really bad is happening. So you might want to start stocking up ahead of time for things. And so that's what I did. And over time, as things began to progress, I just began, things just really weren't making all that much what I did. And over time, as things began to progress, I just began,

things just really weren't making all that much sense to me. I was very confused by some things and I began having questions. And there was a point where Andrew Cuomo, our disgraced former governor in New York, he put out this executive order on March 25th and it was in paragraph five. I remember this document and it's a good thing I do because it was it was subsequently scrubbed from the New York governor's New York government's Web site for some reason. I can't imagine why. But it basically said that you're not allowed to discriminate against people in these nursing facilities based on their COVID status. Now, on one hand, I tried because on the right, you had these narratives that were forming that, you know, Andrew Cuomo is a murderer. And to me, that was a little bit, a little bit much. And so I tried to say, you know, what is the, you know, what is the logic behind making this decision when we already knew at this point? I mean, I think when,

I mean, so long ago, but when the virus hit, it hit this, the big story was that it ripped through this nursing home in Seattle. And so we already sort of knew, and they were calling it the boomer remover for God's sakes at the beginning. So we knew who was most vulnerable at the beginning. And so I didn't understand why they were making this decision. And, you know, the red tape and bureaucracy in New York, I mean, nothing really gets done. It's really, really bad. And so you have these people who worked at these facilities who were saying, we're not ready for this. We're not prepared for this. When we tried to contact the governor's office for assistance, you know, we got no answers. We got the runaround. So the base question for me was why, when we understand that the most vulnerable people to this particular disease tend to be over age 65, why are we allowing these kinds of infections to spread in this particular place?

Let me ask something. I'm going to ask something about what you were. Were you at that point still only consuming sort of quality sources online, or did you start to look at television again? Because if you had been looking at television, the idea of it affecting the elderly was very quickly swept away. Although we kept hearing about elderly people in certain risk populations, but they really went to great lengths to minimize that part of the COVID story. So I'm wondering if the governor believed that, that there was no excessive risk for the elderly. I mean, probably some added risk,

but that it wasn't primarily a disease that affected the very elderly. It's hard for me to think that. You know, whenever I did watch more, I guess you would call it, I don't like to use this term, but mainstream or maybe corporate press, it was honestly very confusing to me. One of the reasons, I mean, I was actually watching Trump's pressers. I watched them for about a week and there were definitely some cringe moments as he's really good at producing those. But at the same time, I felt like, well, it seems like, you know, we got caught with our pants down. I'm not sure what any government can really do. And given the position that we're in, but I watched these pressers and it was basically like, OK, we're we're doing this and I'm working with this private company and we're doing this and we're working on this.

We're canceling student loans. We're not canceling, but you know what I mean. Stop or halting student loan payments and eviction moratoriums, so on and so forth. Now, here is the guy from FEMA to explain more about this. Here is Dr. Zahn. Here is Surgeon General Jerome Adams. Here is Deborah Birx. Here is Anthony Fauci to talk about

various aspects of our response. And from what I understand, his approval polls began to kind of tick upward. And that's kind of when you saw Washington Post and Rachel Maddow say, don't watch this guy, it's really dangerous. But it was funny to me because I was, so I would watch these pressers and I was like, all right, well, okay, well, we'll see what happens. And there was one day in particular where the subject of, are we allowed to say this, hydroxychloroquine came up. Yeah, it might be canceled, but and this ties back into the press coverage, because when I watched that, my memory of that particular press conference was Trump saying, you know, it might work, it might not. I don't know. I have a good feeling about it. And then Dr. Fauci came on and said, he was much more measured. He said, basically, you know, we need to do some more testing and research. That's essentially what he said. So then later on, people like Brian Williams and so forth were just saying like, Fauci tears Trump down. They were creating this narrative that Fauci was just this anti-Trump crusader. And it became very evident very quickly who was actually watching the pressers and who was actually watching the reporting on the pressers. So right from the beginning, you began to see this huge divergence

in terms of what you were calling quality information and quality info versus what everyone else was watching. And, you know, to the point where it just became very confusing because one of the things was like, well, you know, there are doctors, there are physicians, and I'm sure you've spoken to at least some of these people around the world who are working and busting their butts trying to figure out how do we treat this thing? How do we make it so that people don't end up in the hospital? And I began to wonder what you're telling me that as novel as this virus may be, there's nobody anywhere on earth who's ever treated clotting or lung inflammation or any of the other sort of symptoms for this thing. So it became very bizarre very early on.

You can't imagine from my perspective how bizarre it was. The final pathway of that on the medical front was doctors waving at patients saying, come back when you're sick. And when your PO2 is 85, let me know. Which is, in the history of medical training and medical practice, not following up, not treating, not caring for, it's disgusting. It's really a problem. But by the point doctors were doing that, this momentum you're talking about,

this derangement that seemed to take over, where everyone ran to the other side of the boat. Everybody had an opinion about a medication whom they just learned how to pronounce. The word hydroxychloroquine had never... I've been using it for 30 years. I'm quite comfortable using it. I've used it forever. My good friend's girlfriend is on hydroxychloroquine for years for her lupus. I mean, it's just a first-line drug because it's so harmless. Now you have an opinion about it? So this moment happened. Maybe we need to crack it down even further because it's really interesting the way you're describing this.

Two things happened. There was about probably a month or two interval there where this all went down, where all this running to the other side of the boat on hydroxychloroquine but the other thing happened with lockdown as well where everyone ran to the lockdown and as part of that the school closure thing jumped in nobody recommended school closure i was i was actually on television the night la unified school district closed down and they brought in a school board member. I said, who told you to do this?

Where is the evidence that this is important? No CDC is saying it. Where did you even come up with this idea? We just think it's the right thing to do. So break down for me also what you saw after that hydroxychloroquine. By the way, in California by that point, we had a governor bringing in a hospital ship telling us we have to lock down. Mayor in Los Angeles telling us, no hope, mass deaths, shelter in place. Those are words you utter when there's a nuclear attack about to

hit the city. I mean, literally, I was like, what is he saying? It's just so unhealthy. But I'll let you kind of go back to the hydroxychloroquine presser and move us forward from there. Well, you know, for me, the big thing isn't so much the hydroxychloroquine, which by the way, I can't believe you've been using it for 30 years. How many people have you killed, Drew? I know. Yeah, thank you. exactly exactly look the i word medicine the i word medicine is the same thing do you know ivermectin is is actually mandated for patients for people that come in as refugees into this country you're the cdc mandates a week of ivermectin for everybody that sets foot on this soil so hold on drew the next thing you're going to be telling

me is that the guy that found the compound won a Nobel Prize or something. Yeah. Shocking, right? Shocking, shocking. But anyway, that's sort of incidental. And by the way, just to be clear, these things don't work for COVID, really, I don't think at all. I mean, certainly when you compare it to like Paxlovid now, which like, boom, takes, boom, wham, you're better very quickly. It's nothing like that. But we had nothing back then. We had zero to offer patients. And by the way, we missed a lot of things that we could have done because people were trying things that were working, like steroids and budesonide. And we missed all those things because no one was willing to talk about treating their patients for fear of somehow not being a part of the cool kids club or something.

I don't know what it was, but go ahead. Well, we can get back to the cool kids thing later, but it was the strangest thing because even the debate about the eye drug, and to some extent hydroxychloroquine, as I understand it, is kind of still raging. But the point for me is, well, we have these other physicians who swear by these drugs, and they claim that they're having great success with them. And my question from the jump was, well, why would these

people put their reputations and their careers on the line to push these particular drugs if they're not working? It's not me saying that there's some sort of magical wonder drug. I don't think that's the case. I think a lot of doctors are advocating for, you know, a course of drugs, you know, given wherever you're at, at the disease, and your particular profile. But the main thing for me was over time, and maybe this is my bleeding heart artist part of me that's sort of speaking out, but I said, it appears to me that everything that we are being asked to do in order to mitigate the spread of this virus goes against everything that makes life worth living. And that extends to what they're doing to kids. I mean, I got pulled into this group of moms on Twitter in a Twitter chat because I was one of the people who was speaking up about the school closures.

I'm like, dude, private schools are still open. These European schools are still open. Why are we doing this in America? And why are people pretending as if these other countries don't exist? And so it was just a very, very weird thing that we saw, I guess, being on the outside of it, watching people just sort of careen from one narrative to the next based on whatever the headlines were versus the people who were shunned as anti-science or whatever, who were saying, well, no, we have a lot of data here. We'd like to just talk about this and have a debate about this so that we know what the best course of action is. And that's right. The same thing with the lockdowns

as well. I'm somebody who, I think I'm one of the, maybe one of the few actors who thinks that economics is important, but whatever people might think about that, it's part of the thing is that you have to sort of, you have to look at the trade-offs of whatever you're doing. And it's totally understandable at the beginning where we said, we don't know what the hell's happening. And maybe it's a good idea to kind of take a pause and step back for a little bit. But over time when it just began to, it was dragging on and on and on. And just especially living in the city i i call it the city formerly known as new york it's funny you listen i'm listening to what you were talking about very funny with what was going on in l.a i mean you know people weren't really talking about

here first of all our doofus former mayor bill de blasio i i can't meet i've never met anyone who likes bill de blasio much less anyone who ever admitted to voting for Bill de Blasio. But this guy at the beginning was saying like, oh, you know, go out to the movies. March 15th, he put out this tweet. March 15th, 2020. He was like, I just saw this great I can't even do his doofus voice. But, you know, I just saw this great movie. Go go check out, you know, this film and go ride the subway, yada, yada, yada. And then, of course course they changed their tune very rapidly, but you know, the same kind of deal with New York. We have this hospital ship that

came in, was barely used. We converted multiple facilities in Manhattan and Queens and in Brooklyn in order to handle overflow. They were barely used before they came down. And there just came a point where we were, it seemed as though the restrictions were either maintaining or increasing, despite all these other, you know, these other tidbits and infos and signs of improvement that we were going through. On top of that, there was a small Jewish outlet. And I can't remember the name right off the top of my head, unfortunately, but they leaked a phone call with Andrew Cuomo speaking with a few rabbinical leaders or whatever. And he said, Andrew Cuomo said point blank that these are fear driven policies. These are not nuanced. They're driven by fear. And then when you think about, you know, there was a New York Times article that came out

that around April, 2020, where they, you know, 3,700 people were added to the death toll, but they weren't, but it was presumed COVID deaths. They were never tested. I'm thinking to myself, okay, wait a minute, at a time where we need as accurate information as possible so that we can really assess how deadly this thing really is. Why are we guessing? You know, why are we doing that? But the point is that, and then when you think about the nursing home fiasco and how tens of thousands of people, I think, needlessly died, allegedly, because of these actions. So these numbers are being used to pump these fear-driven policies that are allowing Andrew Cuomo to sell a book and to win an Emmy and to be called America's governor. Meanwhile, I'm like, dude, no, you're totally botching this and you're destroying the city. But he was not alone.

He was not alone. It really was coming from all sources and i i've come to understand through like interrogating various people that were there in real time much like yourself and were sort of paying attention that the fear-based policy was exactly what they were using without regard for the full impact that would have on the populace. There was no risk-reward analysis done. I agree with you on that. But this fear thing, I really want to understand what they were doing because it seemed so nonsensical at the time.

But the fear-based policy was to get to a vaccine. That was the, we're going to really really that you know this one death is too many policy which is you can't practice medicine like yeah it's just it's just and by the way think of the many many many tens of thousands of deaths they caused with what they did i mean right where you know this is the point yeah yeah of course one death is too many but doing too much to save that one is going to cost thousands of others. You have to be nuanced in what you're doing. But the fear-based policy was to get to a vaccine. So it was vaccine uber alice, and in the meantime, safety uber alice. Both not very nuanced policies. And as you look

back, probably not right policies. So here's what I want to do. I want to take a little break. I'm going to talk now about vaccine. Oh, goodness. Somebody put a giant, essentially a chapter from a book on my Restream page, Susan. There's no way I could read eight words of that. But I just wanted to remind people about the fear-based, you know, the press got eyes from the fear. So they loved it and could not get enough of it. If I saw the words grim milestone one more time, I swear to God, I'm going to eat my television. And I remember when there were 600 deaths, they were saying grim milestone. And I kept saying,

what are you going to call it when it's 3,000? Stop with the language. It's going to be bad. It's going to be difficult. It's not a grim milestone at 600. This is a serious thing. We're all working on it. We're in it together.

We're going to get going. No, the opposite. Doomed, mass deaths. Let's get as maudlin as he can with every single story. And that was their business model. So part of it was the misadventure that the policymakers created. I'll grant you that. But the media jumped on so thoroughly.

And by the way, people like the New York Times editorial board, who are they to have an opinion about medical policy and medical decision making? They have no business having an opinion, let alone mandating things like lockdowns. I'll do you one better, Dr. Drew. I was very curious early on as to why we had someone like Bill Gates, who is not a scientist, who's not a doctor, who's not an epidemiologist or a virologist or a vaccinologist or an immunologist, why does he get to say, well, you know, we really won't get back to normal until we have a vaccine. And why do you get to just say that?

And we just go along with it. You know what I mean? And meanwhile, they say, trust the experts. Is Bill Gates an expert just because he gives money and invests in these kinds of technologies it's not like a bad thing so so so that was a great impression i was going to say two things one it was it's bill gates after all but secondly great impersonation great great bill gates impersonation but but i i will stop us there because we're going to get into the vaccine territory which is really the the meat of your story and I want to hear it out. So let's take a quick break. I'll be back in just about a minute here. I think we have found the holy grail of skincare. GenuCell has absolutely changed certainly my skincare regimen. I like that vitamin C serum, the under eye creams, skin nourishing primer. Susan loves the eyelash enhancers, uses it on her eyebrows as well. GenuCell has everything to make

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face. The dermatologist makes a ton of money for me, when i was introduced to genucell i was so happy because it's so affordable and it works great i was introduced to the ultra retinol cream which i love at night all the eye creams are amazing people notice my skin all the time and i'm so excited because it's actually working right now you can try genucell's most popular collection of products and see what i'm talking about for yourself. Go to GenuCell.com and enter code Drew for 10% off. That is G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com, and the code is D-R-E-W. I love those ads for a series of reasons.

One, it's a great product, and we stand by it. But secondly, Susan is such a snob. She really is, and it's such a little honest appearance. I have like Sephora in my bathroom. Drew laughs at it. I have every skin cream. Laugh at it. Shudder is the word. And now, you know what? I'm missing some of my GenuCell and I'm really upset.

I don't know if it's... I've got a tube of the eye stuff in my bathroom. Well, whenever we go between houses, I don't know, they get lost or somebody picks one up and says, hey, this is cool. I'll take it, I don't know, they get lost or somebody picks one up and says, Hey, this is cool. I'll take it. I need some more Caleb. More is on the way. Thank you for that. Uh, so let's get back to, to, uh, Clifton story here. Uh, again, follow Clifton, uh, give us all the places that people want people to find you and what you're working on right now. Right. So you can,

you can find my, my Twitter mediocrity at Clifton, a Duncan, that's the handle on Instagram. I'm at Clifton Duncan online. I also have a YouTube channel, which is just a Clifton Duncan. It's my first and last name.

I'm going to find Clifton a drunken on Twitter right now. All right. So back to Bill Gates, hang on a second, Clifton, a, if I pick Clifton A. Drunken on Twitter right now. All right. So back to Bill Gates. Hang on a second. Clifton A. If I put Clifton, I want to make sure it comes up. Oh, yeah. You're she, her.

That's you, right? Yes. That is me. Those are my preferred pronouns. I'm following. There you go. We'll follow her. All right.

So now it's vaccine uber Alice, safe uber Alice, and then there was a third component I noticed that they were using as their way of determining their forward progress. So it was safe to uber Alice, get to the vaccine uber Alice, distribute the vaccine uber Alice,

and equity uber Aliceice so you had to you had to fit their their equity you know sort of criteria also in order to get the vaccine and then these are the same people that then put in passports and all kinds of other unequitable kinds of policies that were explicitly discriminatory and it was this was their idea of how to do this but let's give your your vaccine story what happened well you know it's not really much of a story i guess i'll start it from when i moved out of new york i fled the city formerly known as new york and came to atlanta georgia where i am presently. And before moving, I made sure to check. I said, is there just any extreme data coming out of Georgia? And I couldn't find any.

And I knew that if there were mass deaths occurring, there's no way that it would have escaped the press. As you were saying before, they were just huge into their fear mongering. And so when I came to Atlanta, it was like night and day. From, you know, when you're in Manhattan, I don't know of people who aren't there. They don't understand that, you know, you're inundated every single day with this idea that you're in this pandemic. I mean, you know, there's arrows on the sidewalk telling you where to stand. There's all these digital announcements, vocal announcements on the train, placards on the bus, taxi. I mean, there's all this advertisement around. So it was just ubiquitous. And by the way, for sort of being reasonable, the city formerly known of New York as New York

sort of resembles New York again. And so a lot of that stuff has settled and the New Yorkers in their own way are pissed. I can tell they're tired. Stop it. And so there is a certain amount of New York becoming New York again. So go ahead. Well, you know, maybe the city is, but a lot of the people there, I don't know about them yet. But, you know, but when I came down to Atlanta and the gyms were

mask optional, the bars and nightclubs were packed. I mean, I joked all the time, you could get a titty dance at Magic City, but you couldn't go see a Broadway show. And I'm thinking to myself, who is really essential here? You know what I mean? But you had people. Come on now. I mean, as you put it, maybe there's some career choices that need to be examined, Clifton. That is hysterical.

But it was so weird because I got down here. And, I mean, there was one day we went out to this beautiful park called Piedmont Park. And there were people who were outdoors. They're playing with their kids. They're playing cards. They're drinking beer. They're having, you know, barbecues. I mean, it's like everything.

I mean, not a mask in sight. You know what I mean? Meanwhile, in New York, they're just, you know, people get mad at me because I'd be like outside with my face freely flowing. How dare I? And, you know, whistling and beatboxing on the street as I walked by. But it was so, so, so different. And that's when I began to say, well, wait a minute. People don't seem to be, you know, dying in the streets here.

So I took up a job. I was working at a nightclub, which was in and of itself funny because night after night after night, I saw all these people who, you know, I mean, my job was literally like shaking people's hands, getting in their faces, stopping fights, dealing with drunk people. So, you know, there was no hope. I mean, they tried to make us wear masks at the beginning, but guess what? You can't talk over loud music and communicate clearly when you're wearing these things. Also, our cocktail waitresses, the poor things, they're in their young 20s and they're hot and they're making all this money from all these dupes who come in there, spend all their money on these hot girls. And I'm like,

well, you're interfering with their bottom line. But I'm like, it may shock everyone to hear, but people generally were not social distancing or masking up in the nightclub when they're trying to do coke in the bathroom and finger bang with the girl I just met five seconds ago. But it was so gratifying to see people just having fun every night, given everything else that was going on. But I ended up catching COVID in December of 2020. So this was before the vaccines were rolled out. Yeah, that's when I got it. Oh, well, there you go. And already at that point, I was aware, like just the whole idea that we're just going to have to stay inside and wait until this vaccine comes along.

I mean, to my understanding, we've never, ever been able to successfully vaccinate against any coronavirus. So I'm thinking to myself, well, how is that going to work? But, you know, I don't, and I, you know, I feel it's so silly and so stupid. I'm sure you feel this as well, that I hate that I have to make this disclaimer because the conversation has gotten so stupid, so shallow, and so toxic. I've never had any strong opinions about vaccines or vaccination. Like most people, I took it as a fact of life. I had my vaccines before. If I were to book a movie tomorrow and they said, hey, you got to fly to this country. They need you to get the yellow fever vaccine. Guess what? I would take the yellow fever vaccine

because I don't want yellow fever. I've already had COVID. And at that point, there was already data coming out that was saying, well, if you get this thing, you're going to be pretty well protected. Maybe we don't know how long for, but so my attitude was just sort of, I'll just wait and see how it shakes out. So the original plan was just come down to Georgia and kind of lay low for a while until things blew over. But then our unions, the Actors' Equity Association, which is the stage actors union and stage managers union, and SAG-AFTRA, which is, people know, famously satirized in Team America World Police as the Film Actors Guild. Let's not say that out loud. But they began pushing these shots really, really,

really aggressively. And there seemed to be no room for people to really say, well, what if we don't really want these things? And already at the beginning, I was thinking to myself, well, when will you ever really be fully vaccinated against this thing? Are you going to require us? Because this thing's going to keep mutating. Like viruses mutate. Why are we pretending that we don't know this? You know, and even, I mean, even the, even the flu shot, you know, it's, it's kind of iffy, right? So how are we going to do this? And, you know, it just, it became very clear very early on that they, in order to be able to work as an actor, you needed to get the shot. So in early 2021, I began to get emails from my manager, my former manager, erstwhile manager. And, you know, I would get offers for things and they would say, does your client, is your client or does your client plan on getting vaccinated? You know, or are they going to be vaccinated by the time they begin this rehearsal? So first of all, I'm like, just a weird question. You know, it's just a weird kind of thing to see in an email, you know, and, and, you know, I just was straight with my manager. I said, I just don't plan on getting this thing. And, you know, I have my reasons, but, you know,

and I feel blessed because, you know, they weren't aggressive with me just over time. They couldn't use me because I couldn't work. And as you know, Drew, you know, and I feel blessed because, you know, they weren't aggressive with me just over time. They couldn't use me because I couldn't work. And as you know, Drew, you know, they don't get paid if I don't work. And if I'm not working and I can't work and I'm of no use to them. So, of course, eventually, you know, they kind of said bye bye. And but it became very clear that you weren't going to be able to work to get these things. There were already stories emerging of actors who would land series regular roles. I mean, these are life-changing jobs for people, for people for whom employment is the exception and not the rule, mind you. Right. They're being replaced for these jobs. And what's really onerous is that when you when you're talking about actors.

You're talking about people for whom most of our most of our time is spent interviewing for other jobs. You know what I mean? And and any any job that you get is going to be a miracle. If you're someone who's fortunate enough to be working frequently as I was. And that's you know, that's just that is you're like in rarefied air. So but the thing is, if you decide to turn down a job, guess what? There's like 100 other people right behind you who is going to take this stuff. And it's an industry which attracts, let's say, broken, damaged people who are very egomaniacal and want to want to be stars. So there's no shortage of people who are going to take your spot. So if you do say no, if you don't want that, I mean, there's just a lot of extra pressure on

you outside of the social taboos of saying, well, I don't want a vaccine. And I think what I think the issue is that people, when they see someone who says, well, I don't want this particular vaccine, doesn't matter how nuanced you are. I think what they see is like, you know, Michelle Bachman or something talking about vaccines and autism or whatever. They think what they see is like, you know, Michelle Bachman or something talking about vaccines and autism or whatever. They think you're some kind of crazy nut job. I'm thinking to myself, well, no, I have female friends, for instance, who want to have children, but they're being cautious right now. Are they anti-vaxxers? I have, you know, one of my friends is who was disabled in childhood by a vaccine. He's a filmmaker, a wonderful, wonderful young man. And he can't

get these vaccines. And but he still treated like he's some kind of some kind of leper. So David Fubini, Well, I was gonna say that that the sad part is, it's one thing if this, these was going to say that the sad part is it's one thing if these extraordinary measures to protect everybody, again, safety, Uber, Alice, worked. They didn't even work. It had some effect. Let's be honest. I'm clear that the vaccine had some effect, and I believe there's T cell immunity from the vaccine.

There definitely is T cell immunity from having had the illness. And hybrid immunity probably is really, really good. Like I have hybrid immunity and I don't seem to be able to catch this thing anymore. I've been around it so much. But you had the original like Clifton did. Yeah. And then I had Omicron. So, and then, I mean, you didn't need the vaccine after getting it. No, I felt I didn't, but I was willing to take it.

Then I had a terrible reaction to it. Caleb, you have my eye picture to throw up there? I was looking for it right now. The day before they came out with all the problems. Yeah, literally the day before they canceled it. I took it. Then I woke up with that black eye. And that is a, it was quite frightening because that is the sign of the clot in the brain that is associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

That's how it presents. But he was already, he already had had COVID and we wanted to go to Greece. Right. So he had to get the vaccine to get on the plane. Again, similar story to yours where you don't need it, but you have to do it because the policy. And he only wanted one. He didn't want to get two. I didn't want to get two.

That's really the reason I did it. I didn't have any strong feelings about mRNA versus not. I just, and I did a little bit. The Johnson & Johnson was a more traditional platform at that, eh, I've been exposed to those, why not do that again? But the point though, just as this little sidebar that was so sort of astonishing about this

is that this was a worldwide hysteria it was a worldwide uh a sort of rigidity that begged no alternative and that's it's so hard to understand uh particularly now looking back i mean do people want to apologize they want to adjust their position do they want to say hey maybe next time we have to do something different? This is not okay that we put the world through this. And as you said, you said something very powerful. You said, not at risk, but what was being sacrificed, and I'm going to quote you, everything that makes life worth living. Those are your words. And I could not agree with you more strongly. Well, you know, that's part of the trade-off then, isn't it? I mean, it's just, and you know, my, if you look at some of my older tweets, you know, you might

see some, some ideas about these particular, particularly the mRNA vaccines, which people might find gauche, shall we say. But I kind of backed off on that because, you know, it's not my place to tell anybody what they should or shouldn't be doing. And, you know, my approach from for at least a year has been it should be a multi-pronged approach. You know, if that means these vaccines for you, then, of course, take them. You know, I have no I have no issue with that. And, and, you know, it's, but you can't even say that much, you know, it just seems like you're either, you're either pro vaccine or anti vaccine. There's just no, there's no ground. And in terms of people, I mean, I see no contrition anywhere. I don't, and I doubt it doubt it's coming anytime soon given the what i call the collective cruelty that people have displayed

over the past uh past year or so and going back to our the original part of our discussion where we were talking about how people ran to one side of the boat all of a sudden with strong opinions about something that they knew nothing about. Was this more of that? I mean, did this all come from some weird confluence of Trump and politics and media and our collective personality styles that are kind of, you know,

there's a lot of narcissism in the world, certainly in this country. Is there some, was this just some extraordinary moment or is it just another mass hysteria of history of which there are so many? I'm trying to understand it and I'm trying to give it the most charitable spin I can as I try to understand it. What do you think? Well, the way that I look at it now, you know, I, I have compassion for people who have been scared out of their minds because I was there too. I mean,

I'm literally my, my, my roommate, my former roommate must've thought I was insane because again, this is like February of 2020. I'm in our apartment with, I called it my hazmat suit, my gloves on my mask on. I'm just avidly trying to disinfect and scrub down every knob and handle, you know, in the apartment. I've got my mail. I'm wiping that down, my keys, my tablet, my phone, even my groceries. I'm like wiping down my cereal boxes, you know, with these antiseptic wipes. And, you know, so I have compassion for those people and they're still around. But, you know, when, and I think you said you're speaking to him later on, but I think it was either Peter McCullough, no, I think it was Robert Malone, who was on Joe Rogan's podcast. fear this idea of this mass formation, some say mass formation psychosis, this theory that has really been popularized, I should say, by a guy named Matthias Desmet. You know, I think one of

the reasons it began to catch on was because, at least, well, I can speak for myself. For me, finally, I had a name. I had a label, a framework on which I could hang all the things that I had a name, I had a label, a framework on which I could hang all the things that I had seen over the past couple of years, because it's hard to, and I think for one, after four years of the Trump presidency, especially if you're in entertainment, I know you saw this. I mean, people lost their freaking minds. All these, all these supposed adults just completely lost. I mean, the emotional incontinence of children is what happened when Trump got elected. So I think they were already softened up by that. 2020, you know, it was an election year.

I think it's, you know, I think it's just a huge convergence of things. One, like you said before, the press. I mean, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. They have this big, scary thing. Because before, and I wish, I think I still have this collage somewhere, but you know, there was, there were all these news outlets who in January and February were saying, it's just the flu. Don't worry about COVID, you know, so on and so forth for all the guff they give Trump about, you know, trying to downplay the virus that our press was doing the same thing as was some of our New York politicians, so to speak, now that I think about it. But then as the, you know,

the fear wore on, and it just was every day, it was like, you know, more new deaths, more new, and then they stopped reporting about deaths, and it became cases. I noticed that as well. But, you know, cases this and cases that, and, you know, so it's just, they just, they, I think it's the combination of a hatred of trump and we saw all of these people who are of the same who share a vision of the world as thomas soul calls it who work in media who were you know the democrats badly wanted to win after being embarrassed in 2016 by this non-politician um so they saw an opportunity maybe to use that as a wedge of some sort.

I think also, you know, people talk about conspiracy theories, this or that. I'm like, no, you know, my job as an actor is to kind of break things down to simple human motivations. And I'm thinking to myself, well, if you look at how people respond to incentives, these pharmaceutical agencies, these politicians, these are press apparatus. There's, you know, follow the money. it doesn't have to necessarily be this whole big evil plot or whatever people could say could be saying to themselves i'm pushing this particular product because of my career i'm not going to say anything about anthony fauci because i don't want to jeopardize my funding or my reputation i'm not going to say

anything against what the government or the news is saying because i don't want to be an outlier i see what happens to everyone else you, so there's all these sort of human motivations that are combining and making one big mess. But part of the problem is that you have the small cluster of people, whether they be in academia or in the medical profession or the press or, you know, or politics, this small number of people who have a disproportionately large outsized influence. And once all of those people, or at least once enough of those people become of one mind, then it's sort of all over for any kind of nuance or any sort of other opinion being introduced into the public square. So it's hard to say, but the idea of like a mass formation,

you know, people are sort of uneasy about the word psychosis as one of it, but I think it's sort of been induced in a lot of ways by, again, by politicians, by the press, and just by really, really, social media is another avenue. I mean, it's just really, really bad.

People are losing their minds. There's one really interesting construct in Dr. desmet's uh account for this mass formation where he says he says that you know there are essentially four criteria that have to be met for this to develop one is socially disconnected isolated loneliness we've been in a loneliness spiral for quite some time in fact you know there's a loneliness czar in england i believe they have a loneliness like department that there has to be a lack of meaning and purpose. Millennials, that's all they complain about. They can't get meaning. Everything's bullshit.

That there needs to be some voice. He literally says a voice somewhere coming that has some sort of charismatic sort of impact on people. But he said, this was the really interesting part for me, was he said, you will then start to cohes in these social groups that become your source of connection. You're disconnected. Now you have a connection. I am a pro-vax, pro-masking person, and I'm going to signal that, and I'll have rituals around it even. He talked about how rituals develop. There's a city nearby here where people wear masks routinely outside and have through the whole pandemic, and I just drive down the street going,

what is going on? What do we do to these people? And he has sort of explained it by saying, the more ridiculous the rituals become, the more devoid they are of reason the more they are a signal of the belonging for people who feel socially disconnected and i thought oh that's that's really interesting that that does seem to be a big part of this well and again it goes back to what i was saying kind of what i was saying before is what's what tipped my alarm bells off initially it was you know, these ideas. I mean, I call it anti-social distancing, this idea of you're covering your face. You can't communicate with people. You can't connect. I mean, there was, I remember one woman, I was in the Upper West Side in New York City and, you know, I was walking around just whistling and bopping, you know,

like you do. Everyone else is, it's the middle of summer. Everyone else is masked up for some reason. And this older woman, she looked like maybe she was late 60s, had the mask, you know, it was basically a chin warmer for her. And we made eye contact and she looked at me and she kind of removed the whole thing and said, I can't breathe in these things. And it's just, it's just so nice to see a smile. And yes, one of the things that became really disturbing for me, especially as, artist and looking at how these other artists behave, we out of all people should be aware of what it means to live and to be alive. Especially as actors, we're supposed to be conduits of the human experience. everything that makes being human, you know, fun and thrilling and challenging and dangerous, frankly, we are, we're pushing to the wayside and doing it so easily and so readily. That was a big thing for me too, because I began to say, what kind of loser are you? Well, you're just, you're

willing to just lock yourself away for, you know, one year, two years, but not even that, not even that, but you were children. That's, that was a huge thing for me and people call me selfish because of my views but i'm like look i'm an atheist i was offended when they when they closed the churches i don't have any children i was offended by the way that they you know when they closed schools and you know putting there are still people putting masks on their kids faces right now you know or you know that we're forcing these shots on these children quiet even young people yes you know and even i mean even before the pandemic hit i mean i know you know these or that we're forcing these shots on these children, or even young people. And even before the pandemic hit,

I mean, I know you know these numbers, I'm sure, but rates of anxiety, depression were already shooting up. I was seeing these headlines about college-aged women, both in North America and the UK, who were out drinking their male counterparts. You have all these people who are on antidepressants, all these people who are experiencing these really, really, they're having a hard time. And this was over a decade ago. I mean, I'm in I'm in conservatory. Right.

And my teachers, even back then, were saying this isn't this isn't a voice and speech class. Right. They're saying, you know, well, part of the problem right now is that we're so stuck in these things and we're losing our connection to other people. And so I think all of these things kind of came together and were atomized from each other. And then you add on the political divisions, you add on the fact that, I mean, it's a huge clown show people are watching every day to see. Well, and the one gigantic error, one huge error at the outset was our public health system decided that the Chinese Communist Party had it right.

They believed it was coming out of there. No, I'm not kidding. There's actually documentation. I know. I know. They went, that's the policy we need to follow. And what we have all learned, I hope, is that our Constitution is set up in such a way that we centralize too much unchecked authority in public health that needs to be somehow mitigated there needs to be some sort of process around that

because it's it's fiat it's absolute fiat it's been tested in court a couple times and it they're not diminishing it so there's got to be some sort of legislation around that so those so centralization of authority for me has been one of the big problems with all this but the other thing is back to the fear thing you know when I had COVID in December of 2020, I'm a 60-some-odd-year-old guy with metabolic syndrome. I'm a moderately high risk from COVID. But even with severe COVID, which I had, my fatality rate was 1%. It was 1%.

And people kept going, were you afraid? Were you afraid? I'm like, the last, it didn't occur to me that I should be afraid. It's just miserable and it sucked. But fear of a 1% fatality rate does not make any sense medically. And right then I thought, oh man, we have done something awful to everybody. We really have. Wait, I was, Susan, was I December 2020? Yeah. Yeah, my birthday. Yeah. Were you December 19, Clif, was I December 2020? Yeah, my birthday. Were you December 19, Clifton,

or December 2020? No, he's December 2020. December 2020. He got the same boog. It was at the peak because you went to the hospital to get a vaccine and they ran you around in circles to get the vaccine and then he caught COVID at the hospital. That's what probably happened.

Thank you very much. And for me, I have a history of high blood pressure. I was prescribed meds for high blood pressure when I was 25 years old. And since then, I've been able to, my levels are normal now because I stick to the gym and I watch what I eat, which is hilarious to me because now I see people who are in nowhere near as good a condition as I am telling me that I'm a menace to public health

because of my personal health choices, which is hilarious to me. But, you know, sort of the same thing. That's crazy. Let's get directly at the vaccine choices now. As soon as I saw the vaccine passport thing, I thought this is a catastrophe. This is something that I can't believe we do in this country. And by the way, I don't know if you're aware,

but the French youth have been pushing back with much the same logic you're using. It's just, they had the same kind of feeling. I found it very attractive to see them sort of pushing back the way they were. But the vaccine passport, you know, the defense in favor of it was, well, it's a choice for people not to get vaccinated. And my response to that was, look, in New York City, the predominant population that's unvaccinated is black. And black Americans have been not well served by the medical system and their distrust is justified. They didn't choose that. That's our problem as medical providers. We need to help cure that. But go ahead, Captain.

Well, that was one of the things that infuriated me the most because especially, again, talking about the entertainment industry, after George Floyd's death death they for some reason i mean i have never had an issue working as an actor but yet i was led to believe that all of a sudden the industry is apparently super super racist right so at a time where they're diversity hiring like there's no tomorrow where they're saying we need more diverse audiences we need more diverse casts and crews backstage and behind the camera yada yada at the same time they're doing this they're implementing these policies which disproportionately exclude blacks and latinos from the i mean in new york right i mean the lincoln center uh you know broadway the metropolitan museum all these great institutions were saying no darkies you can't come in here.

And then they would say they would give these just like this lip service. When you put in those stark terms, it's like you realize how disgusting it is. You know what, Dr. Drew? So I had I had this tweet that went viral. And I said and I said the unvaccinated are the new niggers. And people got really upset by that. And I said, well, that is how we're treating these people. Yes, you could make a choice to say, well, I'm going to do this thing and inject this into myself. But the fact of the matter is you have all these people, the same people who said in the middle of 2020, these 1,200 medical professionals are going to sign on this

letter and say that racism is a public health threat. Well, they actually did make racism a public health threat when they instituted, when they, when they imposed these passports. And I'm saying to myself, this is a, this is literally by, by the, by the definition of Ibram X. Kendi, the godfather of, of anti-racism. He literally says in the first chapter of his book, how to be an anti-racist, that a racist policy, he never defines racism, by the way, but a racist policy is one which has disproportionate outcomes for different races. The vaccine passports are literally a racist policy based on that definition. And yet they would pay lip service to Tuskegee or whatever. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, hold on. Now you've spent decades, not just this pandemic, but decades telling Black

Americans that every institution in this country is racist against them. The, you know, the education system, the prison system, you know, and our hospital and medical system. And now you're expecting Black people to just line up and get this shot. I'm sorry, but, you know, and look, and there is an argument for it, right? If you have a population, which has a high, higher rates of obesity, higher rates of, you know, hypertension, diabetes, all these comorbidities, right? There is an argument for trying to coax people to, to take this vaccine. And I get that. At the same time, guess what? Black people, they don't want it for whatever reason they don't want it. And you need to deal with that honestly. And why that is one of the reasons why, I mean, there was a clinic here, an urgent care clinic. Um, I, um, so I got a really, really bad case of bronchitis right

after I got my COVID and, um, I like, it's a pet. I adopted my, my COVID took it home from the, from the bed. It's, uh, we, we, um, we had this clinic, it was April 2021, sent out this email that said, you know, this pandemic has shown us the importance of vitamin D deficiency. And as I understand it, people with more melanin in their skin have a harder time processing vitamin D. And, you know, again, there's more debate about this, but apparently vitamin D3 specifically has great antiviral benefits, you know, and that's outside the scope of this conversation. But my thing is, if we understand that there's going to be lower uptake in this particular demographic, and yet we know what the comorbidities are, then why aren't we attacking those things, bearing in mind these people are making their own choices?

You know, why not push, you know, talk about weight loss? Why not talk about vitamin D? Why not talk about, you know, eating better food, sleeping better? How dare you, Clifton? How dare you? Now you're really treading on delicate territory. Right, yeah. So you can't fat shame.

You can't fat shame, so you're not allowed to talk about weight excess. You're just not allowed to do that, number one. It reminds me of how we're dealing with monkeypox. I mean, monkeypox, there's a clear risk population that needs to be helped, needs to be protected, and yet we're not allowed to say that's where – and that's who needs to get vaccinated, and that's where the behavior is changed. I got two stories. We need to protect them. Go ahead. I got two. I got to jump right in because, one, I actually had a tweet. Again, it went semi-viral. I said,

you know, maybe we should, I mean, most of the stuff I tweet is tongue in cheek because I realized early on like Twitter's not a really great place to have these deep, you know, sophisticated dialogues about things. So I just kind of shitpost a lot of the time. But I just, I said, you know, I think maybe we should mandate a BMI of less than 25, but I don't want to tell people what to do with their bodies. You know, like it's wrong. And I had all these people who responded and were like, just say you hate fat people. I'm like, hold on a second. These people, these people are so stupid. Well, let's say they're so brainwashed. Let's say that they're more concerned about protecting fat people from words than they are, than they are protecting them from covid, which can kill them.

And so that's that's how you know that they aren't thinking logically. But then with the monkeypox thing, there was a there was a tweeter. He's he's blocked me now. A wonderful gentleman named Greg, Greg Consolidates. And he you know, he was tweeting out about monkeypox or whatever. So I tweeted again, completely. I mean, you know, I mean, it's satire, right? You, you, you make things absurd to prove a point. And I said, I think, I said, I think, I think until all these gay men are back until all gay men are vaxxed against monkeypox, they should be shunted out they should

be become second class citizens and and not be able to move freely about it was something like that and he got so angry he sent me this private message it was like i hope you're not serious about what you said it's it's ugly and evil and vile and it was like dude this is what y'all have been doing the past year this is exactly what y'all have been doing the past year. This is exactly what y'all have been doing. Of course, it's obviously absurd policy. You can't do that to these people. That's the whole point. I wouldn't do it. You wouldn't.

But they did. But they did. Yeah, that's right. There it is. And they couldn't see the hypocrisy. They can't see themselves and how they're behaving right now. So I just had to get those two stories in there. There it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, here's what's the, oh, there's your, there's your tweet. That's hysterical. Oh my God. Mandating a BMI of less than 25 would be incredibly effective in combating severe COVID, which is true. I mean, you know, however you feel about it, but it will be wrong, but it will be wrong to rob someone of the choice of what they do with their body. So people, they focused on the first part of the tweet and they completely forgot the second part of the tweet. And the mandates, and go for it. There's a rule of virality. It's never what you said.

It's what somebody said you said. It's never what you actually said. It's always somebody takes it and goes, he said we should be, okay, all right. You're a genius. Crazy. But let's go back to the vaccine for a second. Part of the reason they were able to carry out that discriminatory policy, in addition to the press refusing to discuss the risk population for COVID, the elderly, 75 plus.

They also were refusing to highlight who was refusing the vaccine. In fact, the only group that I saw make an issue of it was Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live had a skit about a black family, you know, making everybody else get the vaccine and say, okay, let's go get it. And they're like, oh, no, no, not me. I don't want the vaccine. No, no, no, not me. I don't want the vaccine. No, no, no, sorry. And what they were, the story they were pushing was that it was wealthy white females who were generally anti-vaccine in urban environments. That's who was not taking the vaccine.

That was the narrative they were pushing as a way of avoiding this uncomfortable reality. And people should be really ashamed of themselves. This was a disgusting time, and there were disgusting things done. That vaccine passport thing. And by the way, I'm not against vaccine passports. I want them to do it in such a way that they don't create an outgroup. You've got to figure out a way. They just forged right ahead with the whole thing whatever well in europe they did it

they let you take a back uh covid test like they had covid testing all over the city if you didn't have the vaccine there's a car right over there take the you don't have your vaccine card you got to do something i mean there's certain restaurants you couldn't go in though it really was a breath of fresh air we were in fr France during the heat of the problem. And they were just like, okay, well, we need you to do something because we're trying to control this thing. And we're doing the best we can.

They were very apologetic. It was not like, where's your vaccine? The way it was in New York City and in every restaurant I ever went in. Or Pasadena. New York was really bad that way. And they would just say, hey, they'd just very gently say,

look, there's a thing right over here. You can go get, you go get the vaccine if you want. You can do what you want, but you have to do something here for us. And okay, we got tested. We got tested all the time. It's fine. No problem.

I don't want to, I don't want to infect anybody. I'll get tested. That's fine. That was a reasonable thing. In the meantime. But it was like 15 bucks or something. Yeah, it was a little expensive. On Friday and Saturday night,

the French youth were out in the street advocating for liberty because their position was, you told us we're not going to get very sick with this thing, and now you're going to require us to take a vaccine? No. That is against the founding principles of this country. And I would argue against the founding principles of our country as well. So the paddy wagons were lining up down the street. We were in a restaurant looking down the street, and there were we were in a restaurant looking down the street and there were paddy wagons just waiting for the protesters yeah hauling away these young people who were just advocating for the principles of their willing to do that yeah they were very upset

they were really really awesome they were just like you don't understand this is really important to us liberty is a founding principle and they are they are obfuscating it and i thought oh okay i'm with you it It's very attractive. I get it. But our country, we went, again, running to the other side of the boat. We didn't do a good job. Again, Clifton and I have really run

the cycle tonight and we went through all the craziness. As we sort of wrap up, Clifton, how do you put it all together? Do you in some way, are you going to go do you put it all together? Do you in some way, are you going to go back to work as an actor? Are you going to keep speaking about this to libertarian groups? And did you ever imagine that's what you'd be doing? It's so wild. But how would you make of all this and where do you go from here?

Well, it's difficult to say. Right now, one, I'm just now conquering a lot of deep-seated resentment. I mean, I spoke about it. If you listen to the rest of my speech, I'm listening to a lot of just deep-seated resentment. And really, it's kind of difficult to imagine going back to work alongside people who just, you know, a month ago, and probably even still today, were saying, you don't deserve any rights or freedoms. And I think you're a dirty, evil person. I mean, you know, you mentioned these ideas of who's not taking the shot. And so many people have this idea that it's a bunch of like knuckle dragging redneck Trumpers who aren't taking this thing. And as we were saying before i mean black black americans vote over 90 percent democrat and yet they are the least

vaccinated demographic and i just i've seen nobody really come to terms with that um i've seen no amount of contrition i mean you know i mean i'm sure you saw and your viewers saw that the the cdc they quietly relaxed their, you know, their, or changed their regular, their guidelines or whatever. Um, right. The entertainment industry has yet to respond. They've not said anything. Um, Tim Robbins, the other day, they haven't changed anything. Um, they're still doubling down on this stuff. They're still keeping it in place. And, um, you know, I don't know why I, it's tough because, you's tough because you know i'm almost 40 years old and now i'm waiting tables i mean i did my life doesn't make sense i'm doing everything in reverse

right normally you wait tables before you make it and i made it and now i'm waiting tables i went you know the complete opposite direction so i i don't really know what the future is um you know it's it's nice that I've been able to, I will say that the more that I've sort of spoken my mind and have been honest about my thoughts and opinions, the more that my visibility has grown. The podcast is going well, the YouTube channel is going well,

but it's not quite the same thing as, you know, being in front of an audience of 2000 people or, you know, trying to apply your trade audience of 2000 people or, you know, trying to apply your trade in front of a camera. I mean, I know people really don't care about actors. That's fine. But, you know, it was important to me. It's what I did for 20 years. I did my first play when I was 16, almost 40 now. I've never needed to develop any more skills because I was one of the few people who was working pretty frequently. I didn't need a survival job since about 2013. I was doing okay. And now it's like, you know, I feel like I'm starting over and that's not a really positive proposition. I guess the, one of the good things though, is that, um, you know, there's, there are

some artists out there we're finding each other. I mean, there was another Broadway star named Laura Osnes who, um, you know, she will very publicly decided she didn't want to take the shot either. And, you know, she, you know, I mean, we're in contact, I've got other friends, you know, just high caliber, sort of New York or highly trained professional people. And we're trying to figure out what we can do to serve, you know, our audience who is our customers. So, you know, so it's funny for now, I'm sort of riding the wave and following my gut in a lot of ways, and it's landing me in the strangest of places. But it's hard to really say what the future is for me right now. And I'm not sure, as much as I want to

work, I don't know. I mean, if you excuse the metaphor, I mean, I saw the masks, you know, they kind of came down and I've seen what these people can become. And when you're in a job where it's a part of, you know, where it's part of your job to be open and emotionally vulnerable with these people. And, you know, and to be fair, they do, there is, you know, I understand why they're afraid. It's a job where, you know, you're making out with strangers. I mean, I probably made out with more women in auditions and a lot of guys get to do in their lifetimes and that's kind of part of the job, but it's, it's, so, I mean, I understand what they're afraid of, but at this point, you know, it's almost 2023. We, we, I think we have a handle on this thing now and people are still persisting. I mean,

there was an article that came out in the New York times just the other day about sagging, uh, um, audience attendance and so many of our major arts institutions. And I tweeted, don't feel sorry for these people. These are self-inflicted wounds. They didn't listen to anybody, anyone who tried to say, Hey, you know, maybe the right way to go about it. They screamed them out of the room or out of the conversation. So it seems to me now that these people who are entrenched in these machines, whether they be Broadway, Hollywood, less so, I mean, they got back to working really fast. There's too much money on the line out there for them to just stop. But with a lot of other performing arts, I said, you people, in my estimation, are no longer fit for purpose.

You allowed yourselves, especially if you're in New York City, you're in the artistic and cultural capital of the universe. And yet you allowed yourselves to be deemed non-essential by these feckless, inept, I would even say corrupt bureaucrats and officials. You're going to let somebody else, you're going to let Bill de Blasio or Bill Gates or a scumbag like Andrew Cuomo tell you that you're not essential. Meanwhile, liquor stores are open, McDonald's stores, I mean, McDonald's is still open, but you can't work as an actor. You can go get, again, a lap dance down in Atlanta, but you can't do a Broadway show right now. So why would I want to work with people who decided to say, I'll just sit back and let the government pay me not to work? Meanwhile, you have salon owners, barbers, gym owners who are fighting tooth and nail to keep their businesses open. Exactly. And so once I began to see that and see these hardworking people actually fighting for

their livelihoods versus what so much of what the entertainment industry was doing, I said, yeah, I don't know if I want to work with y'all anymore. I don't know. I don't know. Well, I knew you had something profound to say, and that is a very profound statement. And as far as the people with their businesses, when we were in the darker hours of, I just kept thinking about the businesses around Disneyland. And I kept thinking Florida Disneyland is open. And if we just opened Disneyland a little bit, those businesses could get going again. And people could – I mean, it's just – they're not going to make it. It's just awful. The other thing is I want to shine a little light on what you said about your professional career and that if anybody sort of

makes light of what you've given up or what you've lost i you have to listen to clifton very very carefully he didn't he doesn't he doesn't uh i didn't know this about him but he let it slip out that he's a you know he's a acting conservatory He's a conservatory graduate. This is the highest level of professional training for a performer. You don't become a conservatory graduate student and then try to do a lot of other things. I mean, you're a highly trained professional at that point. So much like me going to medical school, that's your profession. And acting is not just some sort of pastime that he luckily fell into.

This is the real deal, you know, professional discipline of performing. And it's no small deal that you've given it up or that you're waiting tables now. If I were, my crystal ball tells me you'll be back. That's what my crystal ball tells me. Talent does have a way of finding its way back. But I don't know if you're going to want to be back, as you're saying. Yeah, it's tough, you know. I mean, and, you know, I'm one of those people.

I mean, so I went to NYU. They have a graduate acting program. It's one of the top three programs in the country alongside Yale and Juilliard. I mean, Yale, eh, there's also. But, you know, Juilliard's okay. And, you know, I'm one of those people that conservatives make fun of who took out an exorbitant amount of student loans. You know, you don't go to one of these schools to teach at some school in Wyoming or something. You go there because you want a career. And that's what I had. I worked and I sacrificed a lot for that. And so, you know, but again, you could think whatever you

want of actors, it was important to me, but, you know, there's also, you know, but again, you could think whatever you want of actors, it was important to me, but you know, there's also, you know, military personnel, medical personnel who are going through the same thing. They've been, they've been doing their thing, you know, what they love, what their calling is for decades now. And they've been chucked out of their careers unceremoniously because of these ridiculous onerous policies. And it's just ridiculous. And I, you know, I want some kind of retribution, but I don't know how it's going to come forward. I don't know either. I want it for you. Last thoughts here.

What do we make of people that say that cancellation either doesn't exist or is not so bad? There's a wonderful actress named Philippa Soo, aka Pippa, who made a viral tweet a couple of years ago. She's most well-known for Hamilton. She was in the original cast. She put out this viral tweet about, you know, there's no such thing as cancel culture. And I'm like, well, it's true. There is no such thing as cancel culture. If you never offer any opinions publicly, that challenge is sort of far left orthodoxy. If you just stick to the script, so to speak, and you just say, oh, you know, everything that that quote unquote progressive say is fine, then for you, there is no cancel culture. However, if you say, well, I think sexual dimorphism is real. Well, then you have an issue there. If you say to yourself, well,

I'm not sure that affirmative action policies are all they're cracked up to be. I'm not sure defund the police is the right way to go. I think we need to take another look and maybe tamp down on the climate alarmism and maybe have a more grounded conversation about if we want to make radical changes to our society and economy right now. I have some issues with some of the societal impacts of feminism, maybe we should talk about that. Once you begin airing these kinds of opinions, that's when you discover very quickly that, you know, or let alone if you voted if you vote Republican. I mean, you can be an Ezra Miller and, you know, be an alleged alleged, you know, cult leader. Can we say the G word? You you know you can do all these things and you know you can be in a heart you could be a harvey weinstein or steen excuse me and do all these

things no one will say anything about it it could be an open secret but yet if you happen to vote concern if you have to be conservative or vote republican then you're you know there's something you're you're an unperson and i'm not someone who's particularly white right wing you know i say i'm a pot smoking pro-choice atheist who loves like battle rap and show tunes and Judy Garland. Like I don't have a comfortable home on the right, but because of, I have certain opinions that don't really go along with that thing.

And so it's just, you learn pretty quickly just to shut your mouth and not say anything. So for anyone who says there is no cancel culture, I just think, well, you're probably a boring person who doesn't really you know step out in the skinny branches and kind of you know speak your mind truly because then you understand once you see the sort of pushback you get from from people um what we're talking about yeah i i'm only interested in talking to people that have differing opinions you know what what I mean? It's like you said. It's so fun.

Yeah, right? That's how I expand my understanding of things. It's how I get excited. It's what this country I thought was all about. And to lose that is a huge, I just refuse to do it. And by the way, in the meantime, you're sort of an independent. You're in the middle where I guess I'm hearing most of the country is. I don't know. It's hard to tell anymore the way the world's represented in the media.

But listen, my friend, you did not disappoint. In fact, you exceeded my expectation. I knew you had a lot to say and I knew it'd be very interesting and I really appreciate. As you said, I think you said something like things were happening that you didn't expect. And I'm sure sitting here talking today was one of those things that you didn't expect. But here we are. But it's just a symptom of many other things that are going to happen to you that will lead to other things that will happen to you. And let me just say it out loud. If anybody wants to represent Clifton Duncan, who is a manager, agent type, should they just tag you on Twitter?

Yeah. My DMs are open. If you search, you can find an email address for me. Maybe leave me a YouTube comment or something. But, you know, I'm... Yeah, I would say some posts. Public speaking, if you represent, if you're a public speaking bureau, if you are looking for some digital talk show type host person,

I think you've got somebody here and all that stuff. I don't know if that's what he wants to do because he's a trained killer when it comes to acting and that's what he should be doing. I hate to see all that effort go unused going forward. So we'll see. We'll see. It's going to be very interesting

and I hope you'll stay in touch with us and let us know how you're doing. Oh, I hope so too, Dr. Drew. It's really been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on, as unexpected as it may have been. Unexpected. and let us know how you're doing. Oh, I hope so too, Dr. Drew. It's really been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on, as unexpected as it may have been. Unexpected, another unexpected thing.

And here we are. But just keep speaking your mind and more unexpected things will happen, I suspect. Thank you, my friend, Clifton Duncan, everybody. You can get him, Clifton A. Duncan on Twitter and Clifton Duncan online on Instagram. Caleb, I want to check in with you. I know you've been posting a lot of stuff off the Restream for us and a lot of the interesting comments. I thought I'd been too involved with Clifton to really read them. I read them alongside. I saw them as they were

coming up, but I didn't have a chance to highlight them. A lot of support. It's across the board where it's the pro-vaxxers and the anti-vaxxers can agree that we don't want mandates. It doesn't, don't mandate things across the board for everyone when this should be individualized care between a physician and their patient. Everything else, it's like it should just, the conversation should stop right there. It should be my body, my choice. That's it. That's the end.

Don't, that's how it happens. This idea that you're, look at how faulty the idea had been. You're selfish and you're going to infect other people. Turned out that's not what people were that were concerned about the vaccine. They were just concerned. They were just, you know, thoughtful and resistant. And I get it.

You know, I've been talking about this a long time and we now have other options. You have Novavax, you know, Covaxin's coming, you have other things. But, you know, we don't even have an Omicron vaccine yet. That's not been approved yet. So, you know, there's some reason to take the vaccine. It's not that there's no reason. The question, as always, everybody, is what's the risk? At what risk? What's the risk benefit analysis? And there is some benefit, even with the non-Omicron vaccines, that you're getting some T-cell immunity.

Read Monica Gandhi's work. She shows it all. She shows her work there in long form on Twitter. How good is that immunity? Not that great. Not that great. It's really not specific against Omicron. And we probably ought to be getting Omicron.

And there may be another nasty variant ahead. That may happen. But this is an endemic illness. Everybody will get it. And don't be so afraid of it. Keep the risk populations, keep them well vaccinated, and have the packs of it on hand. And we've got many, many more treatments coming down the pipeline as well. Oh, yeah. I think it needs to be said that all of this is being brought to you by two people who, like we we got the vaccine we're speaking about personal freedoms and decisions being made between a person and their physician i got the vaccine i actually believe that because i got the vaccine and the boosters that it actually helped me whenever i had covet i had zero breathing issues

it was just really just like awful it felt like a terrible flu for two weeks that came up positive as a code let's remind ourselves caleb is on immunosuppressive medication. It could have been bad. So it really was important for him. He made a good choice. That was the right thing to do. The risk reward was worth it. Even though we don't know the long-term risk of the mRNA vaccine, we don't. For Caleb, clearly worth it. Clearly worth it. My government did not tell me what to do. I got COVID trying to get the vaccine. So that's where I was with it. But once I got COVID, I'm like, well, that's good enough immunity for me. And that's all right. But then I had to take

something. Between me and my doctor, not me and my government. Yeah. That's right. We have to do something about the excessive authority we have vested in public health. There's a really funny, oh, I don't know if I should share this. I've been debating with myself. Caleb, I'm going to send it to you. It's a video that is really, really, really funny and satirical, but it's about public health in LA County. And it's spot on. It's absolutely spot on. And I'm sending it to you and I'm asking you to watch it. And I'm asking you to tell me, should I retweet it? Should we feature it some way? Is this something I should stay away from? If so, then I'll post it up on this post over here, the website that's linked over to the side.

Okay, good. All right. If you want to know what it felt like to be in L.A. County, and what I'm sure was, obviously, it's excessive. It's comedy. But the kinds of things that were going on behind the scenes were probably not that far off. All right, you guys. Thank you so much. Tomorrow, 3 o'clock Pacific time, We have our friend Naomi Wolf. There she is.

Let me see if I have her book here. God, I had the book here. You know what? I gave it to Susan, and I made her read it. I said, you've got to read this thing. We're going to hear another, kind of like Clifton's story a little bit, a firsthand account of how things went off the rail. I want to kind of keep the conversation there.

Of course, Kelly Victory may want to hear some more stuff, but we'll keep it right in that zone. So thank you all for being here. Sorry we didn't do much questioning today from the Twitter spaces. I doubt we're going to take much calls tomorrow, but Thursday will be all calls, all questions, only me and you guys calling. And please do show up again on Twitter spaces if you are interested in hearing from Naomi Wolf. That will be tomorrow at three o'clock Pacific time. We'll see you then. Ask drew is produced by caleb nation and susan pinsky as a reminder the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care diagnosis or

treatment this show is intended for educational and informational purposes only i am a licensed physician but i am not a replacement for your personal doctor and i am not practicing medicine here always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me, call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended

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