RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dreyfuss, according to Carlson, emailed the Fox host a few days prior asking to appear on Carlson’s show to talk about a recent issue that Carlson and another guess sparred over: the federal judge’s recent ruling which said that it’s unconstitutional for President Donald Trump to unilaterally withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities” for not complying with his demands.

Carlson’s point was there was no outcry from Democrats when former President Barack Obama threatened to withhold federal funds from North Carolina last year over the state’s controversial “transgender bathroom law.”

Dreyfuss explained to Carlson that the president and the executive branch, constitutionally speaking, don’t have the right to withhold funds from states. That job, Dreyfuss explained, belongs to Congress.

But Dreyfuss didn’t want his conversation with Carlson to end there.

“I want to mention one thing,” the actor told Carlson. “You were talking about the speakers on university campuses. And I am totally, incontrovertibly on your side about this.”

“I think any intrusion into freedom of speech is an intrusion into freedom of speech. And when one of the presidents of one of the colleges said, ‘this is a school, not a battlefield,’ I said, no, it is a battlefield of ideas and we must have dissonant, dissenting opinions on campuses and I think it’s political correctness taken to a nightmarish point of view,” Dreyfuss explained.

The star actor continued:

I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of rights as you and I might have. 

And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.

What’s really important is that the assumptions of the left and the right are all skewed wrong. We have to find areas of agreement and areas that we share. And we do share the notion that education accomplishes certain things. One, it turns students into citizens. And, two, it teaches students how to run the country before it’s their turn to run the country. And, three, it teaches the values of this nation.

People come from all over the world or are born into this nation without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit, mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that, you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves. We will not have any way to really combat the ideas behind ISIS because we won’t know our own. And we have to.

Carlson, who is known for grilling his guests and engaging in combative debates with liberals, was left speechless.

“So I—typically I interrupt our guests and I expected to debate you, but—I agree with every single word of that and I just want to say thank you very much,” Carlson said. “I think it’s important.”

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