Netflix's Tim Dillon: There Should Be a Social Safety Net, but Not for Immigrants
"You can't let anyone in. It has to be for a citizen and there has to be a social contract between a citizen and the government. That's the entire basis of a nation."
Even though nobody particularly cares anymore, and there’s nothing to be done about it, and it’s not going to change anything anytime soon, or later, and I think probably everyone reading this is well on the same page anyways, I feel obliged to persist in documenting Tim Dillon’s embrace of nativist—or dare I even say white nationalist— rhetoric, most recently in his episode with Joe Rogan today, in which he argues, completely unprompted, that social welfare should be for citizens only. The following occurs during a meandering discussion about the UnitedHealthcare assassination:
Rogan: Look, I'm not for socialized medicine. I don't think that that's the best way to do it, because I think you want to incentivize people to be the very best at what they do, and a lot of these badass motherfucking heart surgeons, these badass motherfucking brain surgeons, they want to drive Porsches or they want to live in a big house. This guy's awesome, he's the best at what he does. All the fucking New York Jets go to him when they want to get their knees done. I like those guys. Those guys are important. It's important. And gals, I'm not trying to be sexist. Whoever the fuck is the best at what they do, I want those people to be rewarded for it.
However, I think that when it comes to healthcare, if we can spend $175 billion on Ukraine, I think we can provide a safety net for the low-income and middle-income people that would get bankrupted by medical bills that are impossible for them to ever pay. You break a leg and you don't have health insurance, you get hit with a $300,000 bill or whatever it's going to cost. How the fuck? You can't even work for a year. How long does it take to heal a fucking broken thigh bone?
Dillon: Right. It's another reason you need to have an immigration policy that makes sense. Because if you're going to provide those types of services to people, and we agree that we should, it has to—
Rogan: You can't just let anybody in.
Dillon: You can't let anyone in. It has to be for a citizen and there has to be a social contract between a citizen and the government. That's the entire basis of a nation. If you don't have that, it's a problem.
It’s tempting to contextualize this passage with a brief rundown of the many, many barriers to healthcare that noncitizen immigrants already face, but I think that's beside the point: Dillon is making a normative argument for how a state should function, and his argument is that it should only provide a social safety net for citizens. In blunter terms, he’s arguing that noncitizens who can’t afford healthcare—or other forms of welfare—should be left to rot. I’ll stress again that he says all this unprompted; the pair had not previously touched on immigration policy.
Seth Simons
What’s amusing about this segment is that Rogan essentially goes on to say that socialism makes good sense, he just doesn’t like calling it “socialism.” The following comes immediately after the above:
Rogan: But, I mean, that's definitely true, but let's just say just the citizens, just the citizens. Most citizens are fucked if something really goes wrong. And that shouldn't be the case, that doesn't have to be the case. If they could print up all this fucking money and send it all over the place for all sorts of different things, they can most certainly provide a national safety net for people and it could be a thing.
We all accept that there's certain things where socialism works, right? And I always use this example, and I stole it from somebody else, I can't remember who I stole it from, but it's totally true. The fire department. The fire department is a great example of socialism, right? We all agree that you should put out the fucking fire, and we don't want your house to burn down because you don't have any money because then it's going to burn my house, too, and everybody else's house. So we all chip in, the fire department gets paid. It's not like they call you, or you call them rather and say your house is on fire and they say, "Oh, Mr. Dillon, you don't have fire insurance. We can't send a fire truck." No, the firetruck's there for everybody.
It's a good example of necessary socialism. So there's some things that are good socially, and I think that the word "socialism" is the problem. It's like, it should be a part of the community assets, right? Police, education, it should be paid for by the people. It shouldn't only be like you have to be rich to get a private education because otherwise you're fucked, which is the case.
Dillon: Yeah, most countries that people call socialist are actually capitalist countries. They have generous welfare states, but they also have a ton of private industry, some of them like Norway.
Don’t call it socialism, call it… community assets. Sometimes you just have to laugh.
