If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. – Tom Wolfe

Matt Taibbi posted his interview with Tim Robbins on his substack: Tim Robbins and the Lost Art of Finding Common Ground.

Years later, the Oscar-winning actor known for left-liberal advocacy finds his thinking has shifted in significant ways. In part this is because the entertainment business remains mired in high-vigilance mode when it comes to pandemic restrictions, with an omerta still hovering over vaccine-related questions. Robbins himself was with the program early, which he now seems to regret. “I was guilty of everything that I came to understand was not healthy,” he says now. “I demonized people.”

All the big flagships and media personalities on the right and left remain entrenched, cannons blazing at each other. Meanwhile, many liberals are abandoning doctrinaire progressive orthodoxy and getting back to their free-speech, free-thinking liberal roots.

But, I have kind of a hard line on freedom. You can’t over-regulate people’s lives. I don’t know what that makes me, what label that puts on me, but I am an absolutist on freedom.

“Conservatives who have been arrested” should extend a hand of friendship to “progressives who have been mugged.”

Ironically, Ingraham was mad at Robbins for talking about a “chill wind” of intellectual conformity that began blowing after 9/11, the same phenomenon she herself began railing against when it started to affect conservatives in recent years, and which Robbins is still criticizing now.

Smart people on the right should stop name-calling and slapping everyone to their left with the same sloppy socialist brush. People of all stripes are alarmed at government overreach and anti-speech pogroms dogpiling people for speaking their minds or accidentally saying something wrong.

We don’t need to “find common ground.” Its right here in plain sight. Together, we might actually manage to push back the frontiers of government overreach and crowd-sourced tyranny.

And as a bonus, can we show some respect for the arts, and give artists some room for free expression, even if its not our cup of tea?