In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, The Hateful Eight star Samuel L. Jackson lowers the collective intelligence of the American public several IQ points with his deep thoughts on current affairs:

Jackson is troubled by the state of things in the real world, which he has some theories about. “We’ve been kind of shielded from what the rest of the world’s been dealing with,” he muses. “I remember the first time I left the country — in 1980 I went to London — I knew a little bit about the Irish and the English and what was happening, and then something blew up around the corner from where I was, and I was kind of like, ‘Woah, what was that?’ And they say, ‘Oh, Irish terrorists.’ It was the first time I’d heard the word ‘terrorists.’ ‘Oh, what do you mean?’ And then I started seeing signs in the tube — ‘Don’t pick up untended packages.’ That was the first, ‘If you see something, say something.’ So I started thinking about it.” He continues, “And then I looked around at the world and I was kind of like, ‘Okay, that’s the Catholics and the Protestants — that’s sort of the Crusades.’ And then I started looking at the rest of it and said, ‘Oh, they’re still doing that over there, too.’ Now it’s the Protestants and the Muslims. ‘They’re still doing that?’ So we’re still fighting the Crusades. How many thousands of years has this been going on? But we weren’t in it — Americans weren’t in it. We had our race stuff going on, then we had the anti-[Vietnam] War movement and we had all this other stuff, but we still weren’t in that religious fight, you know? We were progressing — we were making advances here, making advances there, you got your cell phone, you got your computer — and then all of a sudden, it’s like [swoosh sound]! This thing connected us to a whole bunch of sh[**] that we had nothing to do with for a long time. All of a sudden, Bush and those guys put us in that fight. And as soon as we drew blood in that war, we became part of something that’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s like, ‘Well, you killed my cousin Akhbar,’ duh-duh-duh, and it’s like, ‘Oh, sh[**].’ So we’ll never be out of it now because people hold on to grudges in that kind of way — we’re the Hatfields and the McCoys in the world. So that’s happened.”



Does Jackson know what a Protestant is?

Another nugget:

Transitioning to the conflict between white cops and black youth — a subject that recently got [The Hateful Eight director Quentin] Tarantino in hot water — he says, “In the sixties or whatever, guys went to Vietnam, and they came home, and people hated them, they were ‘baby killers’ or whatever, and a lot of them became cops ’cause that was the job — ‘Oh, you have ex-military service? You can become one of the boys in blue.’ And because they were so vilified by everybody outside, they formed this ‘blue wall’ that’s now still a part of what that is, but now it’s kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and now they’ve identified PTSD — but that’s not one of the tests they give for people who put on the uniform. So, consequently, you’ve got people out there who are used to looking at people as ‘the enemy’ ’cause that’s what it was — people were trying to kill them every day. It was like, ‘Oh, my God’ — you see a guy, the guy jumps up, ‘Hold it!’ And young black men are threatening, you know, and it just happens. So all these things snowball and snowball.”


And, finally, back to terrorism:

Jackson says he empathizes with innocent Muslim-Americans who have fallen under the veil of suspicion because a few other people who share their religion have committed atrocities against their countrymen: “When that thing happened in France, we were sitting there going, ‘Oh, my God, these terrorists!’ And I can’t even tell you how much that day the thing that happened in San Bernardino — I was in Hawaii — how much I really wanted that to just be another, you know, crazy white dude, and not really some Muslims, because it’s like: ‘Oh, sh[**]. It’s here. And it’s here in another kind of way.’ Now, okay, it happened on an Army base and it happened somewhere else. But now? It’s like they have a legitimate reason now to look at your Muslim neighbor, friend, whatever in another way. And they become the new young black men.”


Yes, if only a crazy white dude had killed those 14 people! Islamist terrorists, again? What a drag!

In sum, Samuel Jackson knows nothing about Christianity, Islam, medieval history, the Reformation, Vietnam, the Troubles, or American police departments, and the only people who would take his thoughts (or lack thereof) seriously are those who know even less. The dumb lead the dumber.

In other words, he’s one good rant away from a MSNBC anchor gig.