In the wake of a recent Vince Vaughn interview with British edition of GQ magazine, in which Vaughn took a strong stand for liberty, film star John Cusack doubled down against tyranny.

Veteran film star John Cusack, in a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Beast, took direct aim the current state of affairs in America and made it known that Hollywood political correctness holds no value to him.

“No, I don’t care about any of that shit. All those people are just full of hot air and networking and stuff. If you’re speaking out about basic Rubicon lines that should or shouldn’t be crossed, if you can’t be against state-sanctioned murder being made acceptable or economic policy, making the difference between language and meaning so absurd that Orwell and Kafka laugh, these are not heavy-duty things, these are just basic, Cartesian things. They’re common sense, and were debated constitutionally a long time ago.”

The point Cusack makes about facing blowback, for being against state sanctioned murder being made acceptable, speaks directly to the nature of the problem in America in a way that most celebrities in Hollywood refuse to do.

When Cusack was questioned about a recent pole conducted by CNN , in which former President George W. Bush’s approval rating was shown to now poll higher than President Obama’s current numbers, he pulled no punches.

Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush in every way that way. His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones, the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush. He hasn’t started as many wars, but he’s extended the ones we had, and I don’t even think Dick Cheney or Richard Nixon would say the president has the right to unilaterally decide whom he can kill around the world. On Tuesdays, the president can just decide whom he wants to kill, and you know, since 9/11 there are magic words like “terror,” and if you use magic words, you can justify any power grab you want.

Cusack directly called out the fact that in most aspects of the U.S.’s “Global War on Terror,” President Obama’s policies are virtually identical to those of former President George W. Bush.

The celebrated film star laid waste to the President’s handling of a number of issues on the domestic affairs front as he called Obama out for his attacks on journalists, such as the persecution of James Risen, as being as bad or worse than Bush.

The statements made by Cusack, regarding unilateral killing ,was in reference to the ever expanding “capture/kill program,” operated by the U.S. Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), infamously exposed by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill in his Oscar nominated documentary The Dirty Wars.

The point he makes about the tyrannical nature of fear politics, being used to consolidate power, specifically by President Obama, is quite poignant.

But if you thought that was all Cusack had to say, you’d be mistaken. The interview then turned to psychedelic drugs and the artistic process, as Cusack was asked if he thought drugs were crucial to the artistic process.

“I don’t really know. All those things will lower down the doors of perception into the spiritual world—or deeper parts of the psyche depending on your ideologies or worldviews. In a way, every time you take a drug it’s like a prayer—you’re trying to get to a higher state of consciousness where things flow through you. It would be wrong to say that the music comes to you because of that, but it’s part of the experimentation. Drugs have been used shamanistically to go on vision quests, and there’s definitely a shamanistic quality to a lot of that music that I think psychedelics played a part in… But, it depends. Acid is a serious fuckin’ drug. Mushrooms and peyote is one thing, but high-powered blotter acid can scramble your fuckin’ brain.”

John Cusack has stepped up to the plate to shatter the left/right paradigm and has set a new standard for Hollywood celebrities.

To see public figures such as Vince Vaughn and John Cusack, using their public platforms to speak some common sense about the current state of America, renews faith that perhaps an intellectual awakening is upon us.

Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay’s work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.