When I saw that Tim Robbins, one of Hollywood’s loudest and proudest progressives for the last several decades, had admitted that the government’s response to COVID had nothing to do with public health and everything to do with Orwellian political goals, I thought, “Wow! He’s another leftist like Russell Brand who actually believes in freedom and naively thought leftism was the pathway to liberty. Now, he’s getting red-pilled.” I nailed that one because Robbins explained his evolving viewpoint on...Russell Brand’s YouTube show.

Tim Robbins has had a long and successful Hollywood career, starring in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Bull Durham, Top Gun, and Mystic River. However, despite playing the lead in some of those films, he’s never become one of the huge, top-flight “A-list” actors. Instead, in many ways, the public knows him best as one-half of Hollywood’s most prominent leftist power couples. His twenty-year-long relationship with Susan Sarandon (1989-2009) was why he garnered headlines.

Over the years, Robbins championed candidates to the left of the Democrat party, beginning with Ralph Nader and ending with Bernie Sanders. His peak political activism years were during the Iraq War, which he vociferously opposed. Robbins was a leftist’s leftist.

However, it’s beginning to seem as if Robbins was a leftist not because he wanted government power but because he believed the leftist line that big government was the true pathway to individual liberty. If people could be relieved of the burdens of everyday life, they would be free. This seems to have been the same belief system animating Russell Brand.

For both men, COVID was an eye-opener. It turned out that giving the government unlimited power doesn’t make you more free; it makes you less free. And that’s how Robbins ended up on Russell Brand’s popular YouTube show (more than 6 million regular viewers), admitting that the COVID rules were Orwellian and reflected hardball politics, not science. Hollywood in Toto has the details:

The actor/director came out earlier this year against vaccine mandates for his fellow thespians, understanding it made little sense given what we’ve learned about the medication.

The jab doesn’t stop the spread, nor does it prevent the recipient from getting the virus.

Now, he’s taken that learning curve public, courtesy of Russell Brand’s 6 million YouTube subscribers.

The event that saw Robbins begin his journey across the political Rubicon was a trip to England in 2021. Before then, he had wholeheartedly supported the COVID protocols. In England, though, he saw more people defying those rules (had he visited Florida or South Carolina, he would have seen the same, but whatever). He assumed they’d all be dead soon, but that didn’t happen.

Robbins’s changed attitude about COVID also allowed him to see how the media lied to support the government narrative:

He later joined an anti-lockdown protest in New York City, noting how the media’s description of the protesters didn’t match the reality.

These weren’t hateful bigots on the streets. It was fellow liberals recoiling against government overreach and media misinformation. That led him to publicly distancing himself from the art-world mandates via Twitter.

My theory about political conversions is that everyone has a truth that’s near and dear to them. If you expose the left’s lies about that truth, their entire political infrastructure will fall apart. With my mother, the fashionista, what opened her eyes was the media’s insistence that Michelle Obama was the new Kennedy. If the media was lying about that, presumably, it was lying about other things. My Rubicon moment was admitting that NPR (and I was a devoted listener) consistently lied in its Israel reporting.

The most significant political transformations occur when you realize that the Democrats and their fellow travelers are not the ostensibly soft leftist parties—the parties of working men—that they once were. They are now open statists who want total control over every aspect of our lives, always for their own benefit. As Reagan aptly said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”

Make no mistake: Tim Robbins is still a leftist. A litmus test is whether the man who protested the Iraq war begins speaking out about the establishment’s war-mongering in Ukraine and the steps it’s taking to get us ever closer to a hot war with a nuclear-armed enemy. Until then, he isn’t fully red-pilled. However, that red pill is sliding down his gullet, and it will be fascinating to see whether he fully digests it.

Image: Tim Robbins on Russell Brand’s show. YouTube screen grab.