Phil Robertson — entrepeneur and patriarch of the Robinson family featured in the reality TV show Duck Dynasty and now the star of a Citizens United documentary, Torchbearer — discussed the cultural issues of the day in a wide-ranging interview from the Cannes Film Festival before the film’s premiere.
Robertson sat down with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow for the first hour of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot 125, opining on Donald Trump, political correctness, transgender bathrooms, and STDs — the big takeaway from his 2015 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
On attending Cannes:
Coming out of the deep woods of Louisiana, the first thing that struck me — I want everybody out there in Radio Land to understand something — Cannes, France seems to be the epicenter of protruding mammary glands. That’s the first thing I picked up on. I said, “These people are liable to be up to no good around here.” … It’s, “how much of my boobs can I show and still claim I’m not naked?” … Right in the midst of all this, we show them the downside of immorality.
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Never in my life did I ever entertain the thought I would be this close to Hollywood. It’s a scary thing… I didn’t ask for any of this. It just sort of came my way. Therefore, you say, you started out fishing the river and selling fish and you built this little duck call, and you ended up in Cannes, France with the Hollywood elites running around and you have a documentary showing them what God’s about. Now either that was dog luck or a lot of events coming together at once, or it possibly could be divine intervention. Hey. I’m like Thomas Jefferson; I’ve noticed that the harder I work, the luckier I get.
On “Guns and Bibles”:
If you look at the history of Europe and then over in the United States, this grand experiment founding a constitutional Republic — your rights will come from God — if you look at all that in a historical context, it is overwhelming on what a great thing was accomplished 240 years ago when the United States was founded. If you read extensively your Founding Fathers, they were godly to the core of their being. They prayed to God to deliver them. Guns and Bibles is what brought us, Bannon. That’s what brought us here. And it’ll be guns and Bibles that’ll keep us here.
On STDs, same-sex marriage, and backlash to his CPAC speech and GQ interview:
Godly people — in fact, strong conservatives — they’re actually really the champion of the human rights movement. There’s no doubt in my mind about it. We’re for human rights. We give people the downside of immoral conduct, and a lot of people said, “Well, let’s see, the old graybeard said there’s 110 million cases at any given time of sexually transmitted diseases. That’s one out of three in America. For someone to make an argument, “That’s the route we ought to go,” what they basically did, I don’t use terms like “left wing,” “far left,” I just use terms like “depraved,” corrupt” … what I’m saying is, if you take the Bible story and you replace it with a litany of “ism”s. Listen, everything that has “ism” on the end of it, you say “how many are there?” They run out of sight.
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The bottom line is, once the Supreme Court said “it’s fine to take away the definition of marriage,” once that left, Bannon, the doors opened then. And this is just another example of it… I mean, the deaths just from the transmission of HIV worldwide — 40 million are now dead because of that particular practice that the Supreme Court legalized. 40 million worldwide. 36 million more have the disease. There’s 50,000 new cases each year in the United States. 700,000 in the U.S. are now dead because of the disease that comes from practicing that type of behavior. You would think that the last thing you would do is encourage people to participate in that particular behavior. Physiologically, it is very dangerous to your health. Spiritually, it’s deadly. The CDC says there’s a hidden epidemic — these sexually transmitted diseases. They are killing multi-millions and millions on Planet Earth, they said, and we get all upset about Zika and Ebola. The real epidemic is sexually transmitted diseases. It is horrific what is happening. So, we still keep going down that same trail. You have to remove God, and then all this stuff comes in.
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If you replace Biblical correctness with political correctness, which I gave [during the GQ interview], all they’re saying is — I looked in the dictionary, I looked up the definition for “political correctness”: what it said was “orthodox liberal opinion in matters of race, sex, gender, etc.” That’s all it is. Political correctness is liberal opinion. That’s all it is. For someone to build a whole ideology around that — these burned-out hippies, you know, they say, “Ah, here’s where we see the world.” And everybody says, “Man, that’s the way to go.” We’re just trying to get people to love God and love their neighbor, for crying out loud.
On Donald Trump:
Finally, someone taking a stand against political correctness. Say what you will about old Donald Trump, but he’s helped the situation in this case. You know, someone says, “well, what about the people on the left wing over here — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders.” You know what you’re gonna get with them. With Donald, you’re not quite sure. But I’m at the point where I would rather vote for someone I’m not quite sure of than the ones I know for sure of. You see what I’m saying?
On transgender bathrooms:
I say that a grown man has no business coming up in a women’s bathroom while they’re putting their Maybelline on and their daughter’s trying to take a leak. A grown man ought to stay out of that situation. I mean, gimme a break. Let me tell you ladies something: the last dude you’re gonna see run up in your bathroom when you’re putting your Maybelline on is me. I’m not coming there… Once you remove the Biblical admonition of male and female — the Biblical fact — once you destroy male and female, what that does is pave the way for a sexual free-for-all beyond belief. You take all barriers out. There’s male and there’s female. They want to do away with that truth. Once that happens, then it doesn’t make any difference who you have sex with. It’s just a sexual free-for-all. That’s the way we’re headed. It’s nonsense.
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Think about it: a presidential decree that says grown men will now be in women’s locker rooms, playing on women’s basketball teams? Six foot five dude comes in there and says, “Listen, I feel like I’m a woman, so therefore I ought to be playing on the women’s team.” So you have to let him in there; he’s 6’5″, weighs 260 pounds, he’s on the women’s basketball team. He’ll probably be the best player there. They’ll be in women’s dorms, grown men…
I said for a while, erroneously, that why don’t you just go in the bathroom, strip your clothes off, take a look, and check out where everything’s hanging? You should be able to conclude what you are. But no, that’s not enough now. You can strip naked, look in the mirror, and say, “I know I look like a man, but actually I’m a woman.” Why would we even entertain and give these type people a thought? Okay, there may be medical aberrations from time to time, but to start down this road and a presidential decree that says all public schools now, if a man gets up one day and says, “you know what, I feel like a woman,” you oughta let him in. It is pathetic, that’s what it is.
On the current state of masculinity:
We’re running low of manhood… It’s got to where — manhood, when someone sees it, they almost cringe. They almost cringe when [seeing] manhood. They’ve been trying to feminize males on all these television programs and their schools, and I’m sorry to say that they’ve made great progress. We need to turn our education back over to the states and we need to be having a course on what manhood is all about. It’s sickening to watch.