Call me the bad guy. But I blame Rob Reiner for his own demise.

P4B opinion

Dec 20, 2025

Two things recently came together in my undersized brain cavity, and I decided to share my thoughts on them. First I watched, gob smacked, as many of you did, the reporting on the death of Rob Reiner and his wife.

During that time I read a substack post by Stephen O’Connor. You’d do well to read that post. It was one of the best I’ve read in weeks, perhaps months. And it got me thinking about Reiner.

Carl and Rob Reiner connected through baseball and later, acting. Much of what we saw in Rob Reiner’s GREAT films was influenced by his father. To be certain, with only three channels on TV and NO internet, Rob Reiner, still a child of Hollywood showfolk, probably had a fairly normal upbringing.

Nick and Rob seemed to have no such cultural or experiential connection. At times there seems they had no connection. Nick’s drug use would obviously have exacerbated that. But the responsibility for creating and maintaining that connection was on the father.

After leaving one of his earliest stints in rehab AT 15 YEARS OF AGE, Nick asked dad for $200. He got it. Rob didn’t even know what is was for. He just gave it to him. He gave his drug addicted kid $200 without hesitation. The kid used it to buy a hooker. THE HOOKER CAME TO THE REINER HOME TO SERVICE NICK! Talk about an utter lack of connection!

Do you see some symptoms here?

One of the biggest problems Nick had, as so many other children had, and have, is being raised in the cesspool known as Hollywood society. It would surprise me not at all to learn the show folk elite have the most drug abuse among their spawn versus the rest of society. We already know the number of Hollywood kids who suffer sexual identity dysfunction, instilled by their parents, is off the charts. Mommy and Daddy want to be cool at Hollywood parties. Oh, my son came out as trans/queer! His new pronouns are she/her. We love our new daughter!

A semi-autobiographical film was made by the Reiners mirroring Nick’s addiction and the families burden. It was said to be Nick’s project and it was supposed to be cathartic, and a triumph. But Nick said he was never really into it. This is evidenced by the fact that the film became such an apology for Rob’s parenting and a chance for ROB to say, LOOK! I’M BEING A DAD HERE! WE’RE CONNECTING!

Anyway, it didn’t work.

Yes, the media and the superficial education our children receive is a problem in the way O’Connor’s post points out. That’s 100% correct. But as Eric Aude, a friend of the Reiners, said to the Daily Mail, that the answer Rob Reiner saw to Nick’s problem was to bring the “Hollywood Machine” to the issue.

The utter blindness to the problem is stupefying!

This case puts a magnifying glass on the real problems brought to light in O’Connor’s post. While the Reiner case is much more violent and explosive than most cases, we have generations now who live their lives imitating what they see in entertainment and online. That is their dominant input. It’s not watching dad repair a door or change the oil (that’s something you do to your car). Hell, most dad’s today have no idea how to change the oil. Kids don’t watch mom budget meals or balance the check book. Most of that is done automatically anyway.

While lots of tasks can be learned as adults, because they didn’t come from family, the continuity is lost. Google is their guide!

Most of you are too young to remember the movie Network. Peter Finch, as Howard Beale gave one of the greatest film performances ever. If this clip doesn’t upset you, or at least from now on have you insisting dinner with the family is not an option, watch it again, you weren’t paying attention.

Everything Finch/Beale says here was absolutely true in 1976. I remember when the movie came out thinking some of the sillier things the fictitious UBS network added to their programming was too over the top. No one was going to put a fortune teller and a gossip segment on TV - certainly not in prime time.

Boy, did I whiff that one!

Before the decade was out real networks had programs dedicated to such nonsense and they proliferated like a grass fire.

Now we have the goddamn internet!

Just look to music as one example. Prior to electronics fans of a group or soloist were fans for decades…or for life. There were few things to distract from that. As radio and record discs became popular a greater variety of talent gained a following. But tastes tented to stick for years.

Not so today. It is difficult for anyone to really take hold and stick. Trends run in the weeks. When I heard, last summer that Bad Bunny was going to do the Halftime show this year I thought is was a joke. Bad fucking Bunny? What the hell is that? But he was picked because the trend, during the week they were looking for talent, were all toward him. Rich kids were attending his concerts. But by the time he actually appears at the Superbowl his fans from last summer will be on their 10th iteration of talent they are listening to “now”.

The phrase “that is so last week” is no longer a joke. It is the way everything works.

I say all that as a lame example of how fast reality changes today. It is an artifice provided by our google machines1… and politicians.

People, I wish I could say it was just kids now living inside the web. It’s like Beale would say now: They eat like the web! They dress like the web! You raise your kids like the web! You even THINK like the web!

Holy Christ! “RAISE YOUR KIDS LIKE THE WEB…”. That’s the scary one for me. Thanks to an Instagram fad that started around 2012 we now have parents cutting off their kids’ perfectly healthy body parts BECAUSE THEIR FUCKING COMPUTER TOLD THEM TO! And because it contributes to the degradation of society, and proves how pliable citizens are, we have Lefty political whores encoding the nonsense into law! KEEP THEM STUPID!

Sadly, Reiner was a guy who was up to his eyeballs in the kind of thinking that have created the world we know today. He was a fan of politicians who care not at all about YOU. He did not instill in his kid coping skills he needed to simply live his life. Then, in a grand and very public gesture, he made one of the biggest purveyors of our social problems THE ANSWER to Rick’s torment.

We have to relearn human connection. We have to reestablish continuity. We have a generation of young adults, already believing boys and turn into girls, and who can’t relate to the opposite sex! Because they can’t get away from their screens and learn what the other wants and needs. After 50 years of abortion on demand and two-career families, do you have the slightest notion what this is doing to the population?!

We need to darken the screens. We need to relate. Young ‘uns need to BREED! And they need to be THE ROOT INFLUENCE on their kids until those kids are adults.

It isn’t lost on me that if the people reading this take my advice I won’t have an audience anymore. But there is only about 100k of you. Still, what was said here has to be inculcated into modern thinking, or life will get really hard for all of you.