Jason Hartman hosts actor Ilan Srulovicz to discuss defunding the police and identity politics. He explains why group classification can be a disservice to society and how it can hold back individuals from their fullest potential. The discussion goes into whether or not objective truth is under scrutiny. Later, Ilan explains why the government may be enforcing a mob mentality?
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Jason Hartman 1:00
It’s my pleasure to welcome Ilan rolovich, and he has become well known recently for standing up before police and being outspoken on the issue of identity politics. Ilan, welcome. How are you? I’m doing great. Thanks. How are you doing? It’s good to have you. So you’re coming to us from my hometown of Los Angeles, right? Yes, sir. Excellent. And did you sort of make your mark as an actor? Or what was the genesis of your career,
Ilan Srulovicz 1:25
combination of the acting and the watch company? Mm hmm. I started acting when I was young, I just always liked it. I liked expressing myself. art was always something that was interesting to me. So I’d always been involved in that space. And I’ve been lucky, I’ve had a pretty good career as a lot of work. I got accepted on scholarship to a school in New York, and then ended up on some TV shows. And then I had a really rough period where I couldn’t get anything. And then lately, it’s been on a good upward trajectory. Right. And my watch company, I started about eight, nine years ago, and I’ve always treated it as if they’re art pieces you wear on your wrist. And I’ve been lucky there as well. It’s gone. Well, good. Good stuff. So is being in The Walking Dead. Is that your most recent part? No, I did the walking dead. And then I’ve done a bunch of parts since then. I was on a in a movie called Deepwater Horizon. I was in The Big Short. There’s an Oscar winning film.
Jason Hartman 2:10
Yeah, I thought was great. We talked about it all the time. Because we we cover so many financial topics.
Ilan Srulovicz 2:16
Yeah. And then it was in a Netflix series called slasher where I was one of the main actors, which is an anthology series. And right now I’m on another show, which got put on hold with Coronavirus. Good stuff. Okay. So share with us some of your thoughts on police. I mean, this is obviously in the news nowadays, it seems the world has gone crazy with identity politics. And I think we’re going down a dangerous path on multiple fronts. This defunding of police departments. Very, very dangerous idea. And identity politics is really it can be very misleading. And it can really obscure the truth. What are your thoughts? Well, I think anytime you classify people based on their race, based on their sexual orientation, based on their gender, I think you’re doing a disservice to humanity, I think that’s an easy way to D humanize each other, that’s a good way to segregate each other, it’s also a good way to, to attack freedom of speech. Because if you’re not an individual, what you say fundamentally doesn’t matter. You’re represented by your group, right? If, if I’m defined by, let’s say, my mother, she escaped Baghdad, Iraq. So let’s say I’m defined by that, that’s my number one identity. Now, that’s what defines me and all my views have to come from the same kind of history and the same, and the group that represents that struggle, or whatever that is, then me as an individual has no real opinion, right? I don’t have any type of, you know, self fulfillment in the world, I’m defined by this. And so we’re doing that to everyone, right? We’re saying this is your background, or this is your skin color. This is whatever that thing. And so we’re stealing people’s freedom of expression, their freedom to think for themselves. And we see the negative effects of it very quickly. When you dehumanize people, it makes it very easy to be violent toward them, or to put them down or to not have a free exchange of ideas.
Jason Hartman 3:55
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, because and, you know, you’re making me think of one of my favorite quotes from mine, Rand, which you probably know, about, what I’m about to say is, you know, that there, there is no such thing as classifying people in groups, there’s no such thing as group rights. And that’s why identity politics is a completely misleading idea. There are only individual rights, because the smallest minority in the world is the individual. And, you know, when you’re classified by a group, of course, you have to take on every supposedly belief that group has, and you are stuck in your history. And you alluded to that, but but expand on that idea.
Ilan Srulovicz 4:33
Well, I mean, it’s essentially just that once you have once you’re defined essentially like you just said, I’m Rand put it perfectly the individual is the is the ultimate form of freedom is the ultimate place to define rights, the end result of identity politics, when broken down more and more and more and more is that you realize inevitably, right that someone’s an individual, if you took identity politics to the highest degree to the to the millions degree and For every difference that you could form a group based off of it would get smaller and smaller and smaller until you realize this individual here is defined by all these unique qualities. That’s where the beauty of humanity comes in. And we’ve also tied in this intersectional approach now, where you’re not allowed to only care about your own group, you now have to adopt the views of other groups which fit into the hierarchy of identity politics. In other words, if I want to go save the ocean, I also have to care about LGBTQ and I have to care about that. It can’t just be about the cause I’m doing right. And yes, so tying into that issue we’re talking about history is once you perceive yourself, and once you define yourself based on your history, if that may be oppressive, or that may be one that is full of tragedy, you see no opportunity for yourself in the future, you do not see yourself as having authority over your own life. And once you don’t see yourself as having authority over your own life, you can’t succeed. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. Because you’re at the whim of everyone else, I’m in my position, because the world put me here, right, I’m in my position, because society is unfair, I’m in my position, because of my identity, because of my history, I have no way out. And if you can truly get people to believe that, then you can actually get them to not have opportunity to not Excel. Right?
Jason Hartman 6:08
And and what’s so fascinating and just so wrong about this, is that the people who are outraged, mostly on the left, of course, are the ones that are clamoring for rights. And yet they are actually defeating their own cause, assuming their causes legitimate in the first place. Which I would argue that the cause it’s never really about the cause. It’s about something else, possibly. But yeah, you know,
Ilan Srulovicz 6:37
your thoughts? Well, there’s two elements, that there’s kind of the element of it that so the mass percentage of people out there don’t necessarily have insidious intentions, there is a small percentage of people who hijack these groups are who, who are behind these groups, who may be funding these groups of, you know, more malicious intent and have, if I were to say, honestly, the leader of BLM openly came out and express that she’s a Marxist, and that she’s a trained Marxist. So I mean, there are people who have other ideals that they’re trying to push on society. You see on the BLM website, for example, they’re trying to break down the the nuclear family, they really don’t mention fathers on their website, when they talk about the family structure. They specifically talked about everyone else, but not fathers. And so of course, are people within organizations that have malicious intent and more dangerous or not malicious in their view, they just want to restructure society in their vision, which is Marxism, whatever it may be. But the vast majority of people are persuaded under the guise of good intention. These are good hearted people. And what appeals to them is these ideals, these ideals of a perfectly equal world, let’s say a world without gun, a world where we don’t need police. These are things that people look at. And if you’re they’re very empathetic, and they’re very sensitive, and they’re very drawn in by these things. They go, yeah, I really want to support this. Because I believe in this idealistic world, they can’t disconnect themselves from the reality of what’s going on. I mean, you hear the term a lot useful idiots. I hate to say it in some way. That’s what it is. Because
Jason Hartman 7:59
it is that way. Yeah. That’s a great comparison.
Ilan Srulovicz 8:03
Yeah. And so that’s what we see, we see a bunch of people out there who are going out and they also just want to be a part of something they want to feel like their, their, their value,
Jason Hartman 8:10
the title of I mean, you’re in show business. The title of James Dean’s famous old movie is kind of perfect. It’s like rebels without a cause. Right? They, they have no real cause. They don’t even know what they’re protesting for so many of them. And yet, and they just want to be part of something. It’s a sad state of affairs that we all feel, you know, so like, empty, that we need to just join a movement, even if it’s not the right movement. They’re tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant. Yeah, they’re tearing down Holocaust memorials, right. I mean, what does that have to do with anything? It has nothing to do with anything and and the most ironic of the mall would be Abraham Lincoln. Are you kidding me? The person who freed the slaves and brought it together? Yeah, I mean, that’s just so it’s well,
Ilan Srulovicz 9:01
unless you look at it from your perspective, or our perspective that we were talking about earlier, which there are people who have the intention of rebuilding kind of the Foundation of America. And if you look at it from that perspective, the best way to do that is to erase history, right? And then to destabilize cause anarchy, all these things happening, if you look at it from a kind of structured point of view. I recently talked about how there was a attack on objective truth how society has systematically our groups in society have systematically broke down objective truth under the guise of social justice or political correctness or whatever this may be, to the point where, you know, multiple things no longer have meaning across the board. The idea that far is to say this, there was a male rapist who identified as a female and got put into a female prison and raped and sexually assaulted 22 more women. Oh, because Gosh, this story, people can go look on Snopes, you know, Snopes is arguably more left leaning. They can go research this
Jason Hartman 9:58
Snopes is funded by George On site here, so
Ilan Srulovicz 10:02
they are putting it out, right. And so if you look at how we did so because everything is relative, right if gender truly doesn’t exist, if biology does not matter on any level, then these things are acceptable. There’s an MMA fighter who went as a male, we could not make it as a male fighter, terrible fighter as a male, became a female MMA fighter bought a pretty high level of female fighter and cracked and broke her skull in their fight enemies. So there’s certain objective truths reality will not allow you to play this game. But if you keep trying to push it and pushing and pushing, there’s obviously people trying to do this across the board with very different every aspect of society is under attack. We don’t need police. Everything history is kind of revisionist now.
Jason Hartman 10:41
Well, well, you know, what’s interesting about the we don’t need to police Dino who stands to be the biggest victim of defunding police department. When? Yeah, I mean, I mean, the Savage nutjobs out there can just run roughshod and pillage and rape and do whatever they want, if the police aren’t there to stop it. And then you look at the gun rights issue related to this. If people can’t have guns, and they can’t have police,
Ilan Srulovicz 11:07
what are they the irony here, the biggest argument the left has always made is that the government could never be corrupted enough again, like they always laugh at you. When you say Listen, I believe in gun rights, because I believe that fundamentally, the Constitution was right in that this population should be able to protect itself against a potentially oppressive government. And that that kind of keeps things in check. And they’ve always laughed, made jokes about people say that, oh, yeah, you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna take over? What do we see today? that argument cannot be used anymore. What do we see the push for no more police. We see autonomous zones, we see mass mobs going to people’s homes, and how are they not taking over the home? I don’t know if you saw this video recently, and build that little old couple who came out of their home. They’re very rich, they live in a state, people went into their front gate went onto their property, we’re talking about a mob of people threaten to burn down their home, kill their dog and do all stuff. The husband came out with an AR, the wife came out with, I don’t know what kind of gun it was a little handgun, and they were able to hold people off. And so you’re not going to convince me if this and this by the way, the mob is being protected by politicians. So the government is endorsing mob mentality, right? You’re not going to tell me that guns from this day forward. I never want to hear that argument again, that the government could be so corrupt that we don’t that we need guns.
Jason Hartman 12:18
So why is the government enforcing mob mentality? I have my own ideas, but I’d like to hear yours first.
Ilan Srulovicz 12:24
Well, I mean, it’s for one, just objectively speaking, if I were to look at the timing, it’s an election year. Right? Right, the more chaos they can cause right now, the more they can
Jason Hartman 12:31
put it on, you know how many, right?
Ilan Srulovicz 12:33
Yeah. And so I believe that’s part of it. I also believe that there are like we said, there’s people who want to destabilize the country, I can see, again, objectively speaking, I see how multiple areas of the country have been attacked. It’s on a social level, or art even has been attacked. It’s controlled, right? If you look at school, the notion that school is objective at this point to me, education is false. We have 95%, far left professors, the type of stuff taught in schools to my own niece and nephews that I’ve seen it. So I believe, beyond just the police and beyond, just like we spoke about earlier, I believe there’s ill intent behind it.
Jason Hartman 13:10
Can I agree and you know, nobody’s allowed to stop the party have their own voters. So the party being the riots, and look who that voting bloc is, right? It’s all Democrat, it’s 100%, Democrat voting bloc. So you know, those are all that’s joe biden’s biggest campaign rally ever
Ilan Srulovicz 13:27
$4 billion Black Lives Matter raised I think, in two weeks, $4 billion. Wow. And by the way, their their page for the money goes directly to act blue, or whatever that thing is, which funds the Democrats. I mean, that’s why no politician is willing to speak up, if you look at politicians respond to their motivation, which is to be the next party in control or to have control. If they see an organization, let’s say Black Lives Matter, whatever the organization is, that can help them gain control, that has power in society that has sway,
Jason Hartman 13:58
they will allow it to do whatever it needs to do, because that will get them to where they want to be. And we do see that it’s it’s a sad state of affairs, logic and reason has left the building. What are we going to do? I mean, there There seems to be this massive lack, you know, when I go on social media, and I, I read these posts, occasionally engaging them. I mean, the for the past 12 years that I’ve been on social media. I mean, I am astonished at the lack of critical thinking ability, just cannot think critically about anything like when I went to school, you took debate and critical thinking as a way to improve your critical thinking skills so that you could understand how to reason things and know what actual absolute truth was. But now that no doubts about indoctrinating people,
Ilan Srulovicz 14:49
yeah, I mean, 50% of millennials or more don’t believe in freedom of speech. I mean, it’s not about exchange of ideas. It’s not about debate. And so I don’t know what Do what I do see, which is definitely the wrong answer is complacency. I see people scared to speak up, we’ve kind of given up on our freedom of speech not out of, you know, legislation or regulation against that we’ve given up out of it out of social pressure. Right. So we’re just caving in, we’re saying we’re being weak about this. People should be out on the street being willing to say what they think people should be out on the internet being willing to say what they think at this point. The reason people don’t is because no one else is willing to do it. So if no one else is willing to do it, and you’re you got to be the first one, you’re scared your life’s gonna be ruined. Because we see this every time someone speaks out. I felt like it was a risk just putting out a positive video of police. I felt like that could destroy my company. I feel like my family could actually be in danger. My brother called me because look, think people make Doc’s you for doing this. They make you know this. And that’s the truth. That’s the world we live in nowadays, but but aren’t tolerant people? Well, that’s the hypocrisy of it. They’re not actually, of course, we know. They’re not actually tolerant. And they do it under the guise of being tolerant. They do it under the guise of being the moral authority on a subject. And so it’s very dangerous, because it’s not blatant, you know, you look at, let’s say, a far right, white supremacist, racist guy. He’s kind of transparent. He’s telling you what he Right, exactly, that’s a good way to sway you through a you don’t like what you see on the left is this mainstream ideology of obsession with race, of obsession with identity of anti capitalist ideals, of whatever they have to do to have control. And in my opinion, that is not the right way to approach things, the dangerous that it’s appealing to a mass percentage of the population, because, again, it’s under the guise of an ideal when I hear the term Black Lives Matter. And I look at rate the history of racism in the country in the history of problems we’ve had in the country. I go, yes, absolutely.
Jason Hartman 16:44
But it’s not just the US they act as though the US is the only country that did that. I mean, you know, there are slaves today, in the modern world, the biggest slave traders were in the Middle East. I mean, you know, it’s like, well, why does the US the US is the only one willing to sort of let people criticize them. You know, it’s like, we’re a system of the whole world. Listen, look at folks. The reality is that the whole world used to be barbaric. Okay. Yes. And, you know, some countries grew out of that barbarianism faster than others. I mean, none of what happened in history was nice or fair or decent. But look, the evil, white Christians that were the founders of this country, they came up with a constitution that was like, that was like, at the time, unheard of the whole concept that you would have a document that would actually take rights away from government and give them to people like nobody ever thought about before. Maybe the Magna Carta did that a little bit. But you know, I mean, that was that was revolutionary.
Ilan Srulovicz 17:51
Okay, the greatest document in history. It is. Yeah, I agree. And so, again, I agree with you that we’re hypercritical of the US. I don’t look, I don’t mind us being hypercritical of ourselves to improve I mind when it becomes an overtaken. And it gets used as a way to help destroy the great things we have today. When it becomes an attack on freedom of speech.
Jason Hartman 18:10
There’s no bounce in it. There’s no bail, and he never talked about the good things that these people did, like gave him trial by jury. Okay, yes. You know, I mean, yeah, it’s amazing. It’s truly
Ilan Srulovicz 18:21
No, we shouldn’t be celebrating the good as well. I can’t I can’t disagree with that, either. Yeah, my fundamental point was though, that when when they use the language they use, then it is hard to challenge because it’s a game of language. It’s a game of, well, you don’t care about Black Lives, you’re like, I do care about Black Lives, you know what I care about? I don’t want to see people suffering if people are suffering, and then they go, well, then if you don’t care about Black Lives Matter, you don’t care about black lives. They’ve made it so that it’s impossible to criticize under the guise of, like I said, under the guise of being socially fair, or this is what what is right? And so it becomes very hard to have any free exchange of idea.
Jason Hartman 18:57
Yeah, well, you’re not going to win this debate through logic, that’s for sure. Frankly, I did a show last week. And I think we’re going to see a real secession movement in this country, sadly, but I think it’s really going to take hold through all this pressure. So we’ll see where it goes. give out your website or whatever you want. So people can follow you or learn more,
Ilan Srulovicz 19:16
the watch company is at guard watches.com, Eg AR d watches.com. And if they go on YouTube, and you can see the speak truth video I did, which is very good if they just type in speak truth on guard on YouTube. And if they want to see the new platform we started it’s speak truth USA, one word on YouTube, and they’ll see videos, interviews with police everything.
Jason Hartman 19:37
Excellent. And let’s hope the thought police at YouTube and Google don’t take that down.
Ilan Srulovicz 19:42
Well, they’ve restricted it, but that’s fine. Yeah.
Jason Hartman 19:45
Unbelievable. It really is. Hey, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.
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