There are so many outstanding points here that I'd just recommend to read the entire interview about how he changed his mind about COVID restrictions and how it has destroyed not just the arts but the public "gathering place" as he put it altogether.
Sadly, there need to be more like him fighting for his industry -- too many of them are silent.
Here's a sample from the conversation which you can find here:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/tim-robbi ... medium=web
Also:Tim Robbins: Listen, Matt, if you told me 20 years ago that there would be no video stores where you could talk to a clerk and see what that person might be recommending, or no record stores where you could go see what’s new in music, or no bookstores in most towns, I would’ve told you you were crazy. But we’re here. This is part of a larger movement away from the gathering place.
Theaters are failing, and movie theaters are not doing so well. Any form of gathering place other than a bar has pretty much been hurting. You know, it’s no surprise to me how well sports have been doing during this whole period. Stadiums are packed, because people need community.
I’ve always thought of baseball as a place where I can go and get away from the politics and just sit and high-five some dude that might have voted for someone I don’t like. That’s important.
...andI’m trying to understand why we’re in the situation we’re in, socially, with each other. That’s what concerns me the most. I believe that if the vaccine helps you, that’s great. 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.
I’ve done a lot of work in organizing and in protest movements and in building coalitions. Community building is always about an organizer walking into the room and knowing that the people in this room do not agree on everything. But I, as an organizer, have to find the linchpin, find the common thread. And when I find that, I’m going to build the movement around that.
What I’ve been seeing over the past few years has been the opposite of that. It’s going into a room and saying, “You don’t have the right to speak because you don’t agree with our way of thinking.” Or it’s, “You’re an idiot for thinking this or that. Shut up. Get your vaccination.”
You’re not going to build any movement that way. All you’ll do is alienate people. And whether it’s organizing around social justice or criminal justice reform or creating more equity — all legitimate important things that need to be done — organizers who know how to do it don’t create division. They don’t cancel people. Because once you’ve done that, you’ve lost those people forever. You’re not getting them back.
These last few years, they’ve taught me so much, about what is right, what is wrong. There’s so much empowerment of people that feel that they are being incredibly virtuous and generous, yet are doing things that are not very kind to other people. I think we’ve lost ourselves during this time. Just a brief stroll through social media and you’ll find that out. (laughs) The internet has become like a bar that you go to, and you open the door, and everyone yells, “**** you! Get out!”
Matt Taibbi: (laughs) I’m vaguely familiar…
Tim Robbins: It’s amazing. It’s taught me a lot about human nature, about how easy it is for people to turn on other people, and that when people do things that are destructive to other people, they often think they’re being virtuous. It’s been that way throughout history.
That’s something I already knew as a writer. When you’re making a character, you try not to make it all black and white, good and evil. I really understood much more profoundly what happens with the turn, how people turn. You go from someone that is inclusive, altruistic, generous, empathetic, to a monster. Where you want to freeze people’s bank accounts because they disagree with you. That’s a dangerous thing. That’s a dangerous world that we’ve created. And I say ‘we,’ because I was part of that. I bought into that whole idea early on.
Not even a token "New Release" rack (the old one was half-filled with video games, despite a banner still advertising the blu/UHD release of The Batman).
And this is EXACTLY what the government was encouraging, to make scared people turn on each other and rat out people questioning the uselessness of masks or putting a untested, rushed-to-market vaccine into their bodies unless they wanted to get fired from their jobs or locked out of public venues. 
Go back and watch any "Public Freakout" video published on YouTube for the first year of the shutdowns, and anyone daring to push back against enforced masking was piloried as a "Karen" and sometimes those videos led to people getting fired from their jobs when they went viral.
Decades from now, people will look back at these "Karen" videos and be aghast that Americans turned on each other so violently, based on "science".
