Woody Allen, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton discussed on The Eric Metaxas Show
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
I'm talking to the publisher of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Alan Dershowitz and woody Allen. To get back to Woody Allen, I still can't get over the fact that if somebody said to me a few years ago, Woody Allen is writing his autobiography. It's kind of like somebody saying, Bill Clinton is writing a tell all book about his you'd just be like, wow. That's going to be interesting. Except Bill Clinton doesn't have a genius sense of humor. Woody Allen's sense of humor on the page is genius. There is no one who is better at being funny in print than Woody Allen literally no one and so the idea that hash it publishing just caves to the political pressure again, there are moments where you just say, wow, that's huge because it's one thing to kick me under the bus or to kick there. Certain people that you'd say, I'm not paying such a price. But the idea that Woody Allen could become radioactive, sure. And that people could suddenly decide, we're not going to get it. We're not going to get anywhere near him. So that he has to turn his lonely eyes to sky horse, it's amazing. Yeah, so his new book, it's called zero gravity coming out in June. And it's a collection of humorous essays, many of which ran in The New Yorker. And it's just an incredibly funny book, and so the idea, like you said, that the world wants to protect people from these essays. Because they think that he did something wrong. So I would say, you know, even if he did something terrible, even if he did something incredibly bad, what an author writes stands on its own. And these are funny insightful. He's an iconic American figure. Why would people not want to have the opportunity to read that? They don't have to buy it. I mean, the way to respond to it if you don't like him or if you question him in some way and you really just don't want to read the book, then don't buy the book. Well, I mean, listen, I can see both sides of this in the sense that I can see that there are people that this is who we're talking about. They've convinced themselves that they're doing something virtuous. They've convinced themselves that we can not allow someone who has sexually abused children to have a voice. If I believed that he had done that, then it becomes a different kind of conversation because you want to say, well, has he, I mean, I'm a Christian. So I'd say, has he repented of that? We know that David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, murdered a number of people. But I also know that what he did in the 70s, he has publicly profoundly repented of acknowledged what he did, you know, in other words, there's a lot to talk about in every case. But we're living in a time where, you know, what Christians call grace and forgiveness, it doesn't exist. And it was the cancel culture has something just, it's puritanical and moralistic in the negative sense of puritanical. And the worst sense, the pejorative sense, where there is no space for, we've all screwed up or has he has he apologized. Do we have evidence? In other words, we can't talk about that. And so you do feel like it's a stalinist show trial. There are certain people making decisions and looking around and seeing who will dissent. If you dissent you're dead. And people just say, well, I just want to have a nice career. And I will go with the flow. Sure. But I don't want to live in a country where the government can legislate what I can read or what I can think. I mean, it's one thing to protect the public from some kind of physical danger. But to protect the public from this broad ray of ideas and from a broad array of people and voices, that I think is really scary, that the better way that the way that will work is to disagree in the marketplace of ideas. So and what Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book shows you is that you can have the most censored book in America, no reviews, boycotting, censorship, of all kinds, and it's the bestselling book in America over 20 or 25 weeks. So that's another reason that censorship shouldn't be allowed in this country because it doesn't even achieve the intended effect..