Comedian Rob Schneider sharply criticized the president and his administration for leading America down a slippery slope, warning against the typical unhappy endings that befall most democracies.

“We are sliding very fast towards fascism. It’s an ugly kind of thing,” Schneider told Philadelphia’s WPHT radio host Chris Stigall on Friday. “There’s this kind of mob mentality that we have to be careful of.”

In a wide-ranging interview, the actor/screenwriter said that today’s comics had to be careful on tackling hot-button political issues.

“There’s a polarization that’s happening,” he said. “You can look at government and go, ‘Wow, it is out of control now,’ and if you do criticize or tend to be not directly along a liberal stand, then, yeah, you can get murdered.”

Schneider said he didn’t know “what Obama stands for personally,” adding that a friend at Fortune (magazine) told him “there’s not one segment of business that hasn’t been hurt by his administration.”

For-profit universities have been especially hard-hit, he said.

“They’re trying to literally kill for-profit universities. This was Sen. Kennedy’s big, big thing, another elitist that went to Harvard,” Schneider said. “I recently came back from Full Sail University in Florida. It’s for the entertainment world, like learning to be a studio sound engineer. Great school. Wonderful school. And they’re trying to kill it.”

Among some light banter, Stigall asked Schneider about the government’s impact on the media. The comedian cited a recent study by a Scandinavian country that ranked freedom of the press in the United States at 133rd in the world, just ahead of Haiti.

“We really don’t have freedom of the press here,” Schneider said. “It’s owned by about eight different companies, and it doesn’t really necessarily express or help the average American.”

That’s one of the reasons Schneider is producing and financing his own TV comedy series.