Actor Richard
Dreyfuss: Constitution Binds Us Together to Fight ISIS
by Breitbart News 30 Nov 2015
Academy Award-winning actor Richard
Dreyfuss told Breitbart News’s Michael P. Leahy that America needs to
dramatically improve its civic education for students in public schools so
they have a belief system rooted in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Constitution is “the greatest political revolution in
the history of civilization,” Dreyfuss said, and without a clear public
understanding of it, our country will lack a common bond and be unprepared to
respond to challenges, particularly the terrorism perpetrated against us by
ISIS.
“They’re going to come here and they’re going to kill
children… we’d better have a belief system in place, or else we’re going
to flee as if we were Iraqis,” Dreyfuss added.
“Before the Constitution we had to whisper all discussion of
politics, or else they’d hang us. That is the achievement of the American
Constitution and the Bill of
Rights,” Dreyfuss, told Leahy, who was guest hosting the Dan Mandis Show
on Nashville’s WWTN radio station.
Dreyfuss is the founder of the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative because
he is an ardent supporter of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights:
“That is a reminder that in history 250 years is a blink and
we think the world is always like this, but it is as vulnerable as it could be
to any organization like ISIS that has a belief system that people could rely
on,” he added.
Earlier, Dreyfuss explained why belief systems were so
critical and how a country that lacks a belief system will fail. “When we
trained the Iraqi army we spent $2 trillion training them to an expertise in
weaponry and military tactics. And we gave them the best weaponry we had. And
they fled and disappeared at the first echo of the first shot. The reason that
happened is we neglected to teach them any belief system that they could rely
on after the shots started to get fired,” Dreyfuss said.
“You have to have a belief in something,” he asserted.
“People have a right to know who they are and why they are
who they are. We neglected to teach that to the Iraqi Army. So, no wonder they
fled and half of them went to ISIS,” Dreyfuss noted.
Dreyfuss elaborated on the significance of the American
Constitution:
Up until the invention of the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights, the things that 98 percent of the world had to agree to was being
lashed, having their fingers chopped off or being hung at any mention of
political discussion or dissent. And that was the truth of the world for over
6,000 years until we said ‘If you can get here, if you can manage to make that
journey, you get all of that for free: you get freedom of worship, freedom of
thought, freedom of expression, freedom of mind, freedom of opportunity. You
don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to move, and if you want to start an
endeavor and it works, you get the reward. If you want to start an endeavor and
it doesn’t work, you get to start another one.
Dreyfuss also explained why he started the Dreyfuss
Initiative in 2008.
“The Dreyfuss Initiative was born the moment I realized that
civics had been removed from the curriculum for all grades below High School
graduation. Along with sewing and literature, but the most important was civics
which teaches you not only how to love your country, but [also] why,” he
said.
“I remembered this quote from de Tocqueville who said
‘America is the only country in the history of the world that is connected only
by ideas. They have no common caste, no common class, no common religion, no
common ancestral worship, and no common crime.’ They are bound only by the
ideas of the enlightenment and if those ideas are not taught to each
generation, we are not bound [together], and we aren’t,” Dreyfuss added.
Dreyfuss elaborated on what he called “the imperfect
miracle” of the Constitution. “We knew we had what I call the imperfect miracle
of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.The imperfections are things like,
we blinked when the southerners said we’ll leave if you don’t approve of
slavery. There were various ways [such as] the electoral college that kept the
elite in power. But, it was such a major step towards equity and towards
fairness that you could easily forgive those errors and know that the process
of getting rid of them was already in place,” Dreyfuss told Leahy.
Dreyfuss also explained the mission of the Dreyfuss
Initiative:
It describes a curriculum for the grades below High School
graduation. A curriculum which begins in kindergarten and ends in the 11th
grade. It starts with mythology and glory tales as we do now except all of the
tales would have an Enlightenment ending. The heroes of my stories are all
those people who stood up for the freedom of the mind. Then by the fourth
grade when kids are mature enough to understand the use of metaphor, then you
can start teaching discussion, debate, dissent, clarity of thought, clarity of
expression. Those things are not only taught in that one class but are threaded
throughout the curriculum of all classes. So you know why you go to sewing
after you go to history and you learn capitalism in sewing. And you learn to
discuss it.
Dreyfuss closed the interview with a dramatic call to
action. Parents, he argued, should become actively involved in insisting their
children’s schools change their curriculum to emphasize the Constitution and
civics.
“When people from the right and people from the left stand
up and give me a standing ovation at a speech, I say to them ‘ What are you
going to do now? Now that you’ve applauded me, what are you going to do? Are
you going to get up off your ass and do something like change the curriculum of
your kid’s school?’ “ Dreyfuss asked rhetorically.
“If you ain’t going to do it,” Dreyfuss said, “you ain’t
doing any good by giving me a standing ovation.”
Dreyfuss, long associated with liberal causes, raised
eyebrows on the left in a 2013 CNN
interview with Piers Morgan, when he opposed gun control and called the National Rifle
Association and its members “heroes” for
training gun owners on the proper use of guns. “I don’t think the NRA is a
villain. I think we should turn this over to the people who are expert at this
and the original mandate of the NRA was to train responsible gun ownership and
the NRA should handle it. They should train excellence in gun ownership.”
Dreyfuss’s comments left the ardently pro-gun control
Morgan, a former CNN host, speechless.
In 2015, Dreyfuss provoked considerable comment on the right
when he called for a re-write of the 2nd amendment: Dreyfuss told the New
York Observer:
The Second Amendment. It’s the only Amendment that’s
obscurely written, and I would have made it clear. I would have said, “This is
for establishing militia and everyone has the right to participate in that
militia, and you can have a gun if you participate in that militia.”
Dreyfuss will star as convicted financial con man Bernie
Madoff, whose $50
billion Ponzi Scheme decimated the life savings of many high net
worth investors, in a four hour ABC mini-series set to air in February. “Don’t
forget something. I’ve never made a film, ever, that’s against my own ethics
and principle. Ever,” Dreyfuss told Leahy.
“And Bernie Madoff fits right into that. So that while
you’re watching it, remember that I put that in my collection of work because
it has something incredibly important to say,” Dreyfuss added.
Here’s a partial transcript of that interview:
Leahy: You and I were talking earlier … about
the importance of understanding why you fight, why we are a country. We talked
a little bit about the importance of Frank Capra, the great director who did It’s
a Wonderful Life, and many, many others. He did a series of films
called Why We Fight for soldiers in World War II. Tell us about how that
kind of understanding of the belief of what the country is about….Do you think
we need a modern rendition of Why We Fight and is that..a project that
if someone were to approach you about perhaps even narrating it that you might
have an interest in.
Dreyfuss: Absolutely I have a total interest in it,
and I don’t just want to narrate it, I want to design it, write it and produce
it.
Leahy: If you designed it, what would be the main
theme of that?
Dreyfuss: The main theme would be that people don’t
realize that any political discussion that you and I may be having right now on
the radio would have 250 years ago been accomplished in a whisper.
Leahy: A lot of commentators, Tom Brokaw, for
instance, commented on MSNBC the other day that here in the US the country has
to be all in in this fight against the ISIS terrorists, and really, with only
one percent of the population engaged in combat over there [in the Middle
East], there’s not quite the level of national commitment we need to win. Would
you agree with Brokaw on that, Richard?
Dreyfuss: Well, I think I agree that we all have to,
in a consensus, have to agree to the need for such a system. The fact that one
percent goes over to do the actual fighting is not irrelevant, but it misstates
the argument, because only one percent fought World War II.
The fact is, we have to support the fighters with a belief
system. We have to let them know that we have a belief in the rights of the
individual, the rights against the oppressive possibilities of their own
government, that they have the right to worship God as they please no matter
what, and … all the other freedoms that come with it.
And what we have to do is educate the entire population in
an intense, realistic background education to give them the knowledge so that
when one out of a thousand are picked to go fight, that they’re coming from a
re-enforced, revived, intellectual resource pool called ‘the student body’ and
they know that they know what they’re fighting for.
Leahy: You have been involved, throughout much of
your career, very prominently associated with liberal causes. I suppose you
would call yourself politically more on the liberal spectrum. Would that be a
fair characterization?
Dreyfuss: I think that those characterizations are
about as out-of-date as all of the political parties of the 19th century. There
was the Know Nothing Party, and there were the Whigs and what the hell does
that mean?
So, I will tell you now that the word liberal is misapplied
and the word conservative is misapplied and we’d better start with something
else or else we’re going to be fighting an irrelevant Civil War.
Leahy: It sounds to me what that something else is to
you is the Constitution.
Dreyfuss: I would say the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights….is an achievement beyond anyone’s understanding. It has actually
accomplished more than anyone actually set out to accomplish. When you
have the courage to sit down and write out what you believe and what you want
for your nation and say, “This is what we hope to be, this is what we want to
be when we grow up.”
“And that’s the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is not a
done deal. It’s a goal. And when we have all of those freedoms in our head,
then we will have grown up, and no country in history… no nation ever took
those thoughts and put them up on a wall so that every one could see it.
Leahy: Why are so few people in Hollywood ardently
supportive of the Constitution in the way you are? That baffles a lot of folks
and your …heartfelt support for the Constitution is extraordinarily
encouraging.
Dreyfuss: People are angry with Hollywood because
they’re not expressing something that no one’s ever asked them to express,
which is a worship or love or devotion to the Constitution. What they say is
‘you’re a bunch of liberals.’ And liberalism has nothing to do with it, except
classical liberalism which is another story completely. Conservatives
always say in Hollywood, that they don’t work, that they’re not allowed to work
as much as liberals are and it’s all a bunch of hooey. Conservatives are always
working. As a matter of fact they work probably more steadily than anybody else
in Hollywood, and liberals don’t know what liberalism is anymore, and so
they’re hard pressed to define their own position, and so what you’ve got to do
is literally start with some other words because ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’
ain’t cutting it.
You can listen to the complete interview here:
Richard
Dreyfuss
Richard Dreyfuss
is a governing board member for the Common
Cause, and made the National Rifle
Association enemies list listed in 2013.
Note: Melanne Verveer
was a field manager for the Common Cause,
the EVP for the People for the American
Way, and is a director at the Atlantic
Council of the United States (think tank).
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Common Cause, the People for
the American Way, and the Sundance
Institute.
George
Soros was the chairman for the Foundation
to Promote Open Society, and is the founder & chairman for the Open Society Foundations.
Open
Society Foundations was a funder for the Atlantic Council of the United States (think tank), and the American Constitution Society.
Margery Tabankin
is a director at the People for the
American Way, and the treasurer for the
Barbra Streisand
Foundation.
Barbra
Streisand Foundation was a funder for the American Constitution Society.
Barbra Streisand
is the founder of the Barbra Streisand
Foundation, a trustee at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, and made the National Rifle Association enemies list listed in 2013.
Norman
Lear is a director at the People for
the American Way, married to Lyn
Davis Lear, and made the National Rifle
Association enemies list listed in 2013.
Lyn
Davis Lear is married to Norman Lear,
a trustee at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, and a trustee at the Sundance
Institute.
Kenneth
D. Cole is a trustee at the Sundance
Institute, and married to Maria
Cuomo Cole.
Maria Cuomo Cole
is married to Kenneth D. Cole, a trustee
at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun
Violence, and Mario M. Cuomo’s
daughter.
Brady
Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a “Gun
Safety, Gun Control” group for guns.
Mario
M. Cuomo was Maria Cuomo Cole’s
father, and a board of adviser’s member for the American Constitution Society.
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