Andrew Clavin’s scathing takedown of Obama’s SOTU frames "We the People" as hollow Star Wars rhetoric while branding his presidency a failure—$1T Obamacare disasters, Iran nuclear deals, and Syria’s ISIS collapse. Comparing him to Napoleon’s Abukir Bay defeat, he argues Obama’s legacy mirrors Britain’s post-war decline, not Reagan’s revival. The episode pivots to cultural warfare: conservatives must ditch state-enforced morality (e.g., gay marriage bans) but counter leftist media dominance with their own narratives—highlighting his crime anthology Shock to the System as a blueprint for modern resistance. Clavin’s closing jab: Obama’s "destruction" demands conservative leaders, not just critics. [Automatically generated summary]
In his final State of the Union address last night, Barack Obama called for greater civility between Democrats and those other dirtbags.
The president reminded all Americans that we the people are the first three words of something or other, maybe the opening scroll to Star Wars, he couldn't remember, but whatever it is, it's something important that people like, so he thought he'd mention it.
The president celebrated his many achievements, and indeed, even while he was speaking, 10 kidnapped American sailors were released by Iran because Iran was eager to get back to building their nuclear weapons so they could destroy Israel while the rest of the Middle East goes up in flames.
So that's a positive.
When it came to the economy, the president laid out a vision of the future in which America becomes more like Europe.
Whatever you want to do is paid for by government for 70 years, and then we go broke and Muslims kill everyone.
Now, many on the right took issue with this idea of the future.
But to this commentator, who will pretty surely be dead in 70 years, I say, alihu Akbar, and bring it on.
To me, the president's words increasingly made perfect sense, especially if every time he said it's the right thing to do, you downed a beer in a shot.
In light of that, what could be more inspiring to America's youth than the fact that I came to work this morning with a hangover that would have killed a lesser man?
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
All right.
Well, you know, the big news, the big news is that LA may get not just one football team, but two football teams, which made me think like, Obama's right, the country's in great shape, you know.
I have very narrow interests.
So I was thinking, this is the best state of the union ever.
It's like, all he had to do was get up and say, you know, as my presidency comes to an end, LA may get two football teams.
I would have been, I signed me, I'm voting for Hillary now.
It's like, whatever you're doing, just keep it up.
I watched the State of the Union last night, and I thought about the Battle of Abukir Bay.
And this is why you come and you listen to this show.
This is why a select group of the intellectual elite are listening to this show, because there are 300 million people in this country, and only one of them watched the State of the Union and think, this reminds me of the Battle of Abukir Bay.
Why Abukir Bay Matters00:02:06
It's also called the Battle of the Nile, which is better because I actually don't know how Abukir is pronounced.
It could be anything.
One of the problems with, if you read, instead of watching TV, is you don't really know how to pronounce anything.
Whereas if you watch TV, you don't know anything, so you don't have to pronounce anything, which is much easier.
The Battle of the Nile, the Battle of Abukir Bay.
1798, Napoleon, right, there's been the French Revolution, and everybody in Europe just wants to keep their kings alive and doesn't want the revolution spreading.
So they go to war with France, and Napoleon starts taking over Europe, right?
1798, he invades Egypt.
And the reason he invades Egypt is because only Britain is really threatening his dominance of Europe.
And he knows that if he gets Egypt, he can then get through to British India and basically take them out.
And so he goes into Egypt and he goes in with this incredible imperial parade of scientists and archaeologists because he's not just going to conquer the place, he's going to study it.
He's got all kinds of professors and everything.
It's just this huge parade and they go marching into Egypt and they park their ships in Abukir Bay.
And so Admiral Nelson sails by and says, oh, look, there's the French fleet.
And he just burns it to the ground, basically.
I think Nelson said victory is not a big enough word for what just happened here.
He just wipes them off.
Okay, and that's important because now the British are safe, right?
But the British are on an island.
And the first Lord of the Admiralty goes before Parliament and he says, I'm not saying the French can't come, but they can't come by sea.
Ha You know, all the people in Parliament laugh and then go back to sleeping with little boys because it's Britain.
It's a strange country.
Anyway, so now the British are basically going to win this war.
I mean, it takes them another, whatever, 15 years or something before Trafalgar, but it's basically they're going to win.
And that is going to isolate them from the revolution.
So they're going to have a different government.
I mean, the British have been isolated from many things that happened to Europe, like the Inquisition didn't get to England.
The Nazis didn't get to England.
Right's Hate for Liberal Presidents00:02:25
I don't think they have reruns of Happy Days.
I think that they've isolated themselves from some of the worst things that happen around them.
So, all right, why does this come to mind?
And the reason this comes to mind is I'm watching the State of the Union.
And, you know, I like fantasy.
I like Game of Thrones.
And, you know, I enjoyed the State of the Union.
I like Obama fantasizing about what a great job he's done.
You know, it's terrific.
But I'm asking myself the question: is this guy really an important president?
And a lot of people on the right feel he has been transformative.
I mean, I think Ben Shapiro feels he's been transformative.
And a lot of people tell me, this is a trend.
He's been as transformative on the left as Reagan was on the right.
And so I wanted to think about this because the thing about politics and the reason I am probably never going to be the most popular political commentator around is because politics, people get, their minds get clouded by emotion and personality.
This happens in business too.
I mean, sometimes people do things in business that make me want to rip their heads off.
And I have to remind myself, oh, no, I actually want them to do that.
They just did it in a way that makes me crazy.
Maybe they didn't call me or whatever.
And I have to remember to look at results.
So the left hated Richard Nixon.
And now they look back and say, like, oh, wait, he was an extremely liberal president.
I think Noam Chomsky said he was the last liberal president, was Richard Nixon.
And the right hated Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton was really, I mean, he may not have been conservative in his heart, and he may have been a bad guy, but he governed at home.
My judgment of him, I lived out of the country during the Clinton administration, so I wasn't caught up in a lot of the emotion.
And it just seemed to me he did a good job at home, even though a lot of it was forced on him by Congress.
But still, still, you know, he negotiated, he compromised, and he did a bad job overseas because he really did let that get away from any, and he was corrupt and all this stuff.
But, you know, I mean, the right hated Clinton.
They impeached him.
And really, when you look at what he did, most of it was fine, especially economically.
So I'm looking at this guy, and we on the right hate him, and he knows it, and he plays it.
You know, Obama is an expert at making us angry.
That's what he does.
He makes us angry.
And so we sit there and go, like, he's transformative because you're seeing the world through your fear that he's transforming the world.
Rise of the Right?00:15:18
So I started to think, well, what time in history is this most like?
So I could sort of judge it.
I could compare it to something.
And the thing is, if you don't know much about history, every time the stuff that you know about always looks like this time.
So if you've heard vaguely that there used to be a guy like Hitler named Hitler and he was kind of a bad guy, and every time you see a bad guy, you think, that guy is like Hitler.
You think like, you know, maybe you read a book, just saying, you know, because, you know, George W. Bush, Hitler, not so much, you know?
And like, you know, that's the thing if you've heard that there was an empire called Rome and it fell and things are going badly, the economy's suffering.
Oh, it's the fall of Rome.
It's just like what happened during the fall of Rome.
I see some similarities between us and Rome.
I mean, the Roman Empire followed the Greek Empire, like our coming empire followed, followed the English Empire.
The Greeks were a seafaring, literate group of homosexuals, so were the British.
And the Romans were, you know, Not a really poetic or artistic group of people, but a very militaristic, excellent fighters, excellent at building new technology, aqueducts, roads, and things like that, and pretty nice to the people they conquered after they killed everybody who got in their way.
And that really is kind of like us.
So there is the similarity.
And there are times, I have to confess, when our current situation is worrisomely like the fall, not the fall of the Roman Empire, but the fall of the Roman Republic.
Because Rome had a republic for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it fell when it just stagnated because the rich and the poor were at odds, and the people, there were demagogues running around, and finally Julius Caesar went out and they had, just like we have, we're being threatened by these Muslim savages, these Islamist savages.
They were being threatened by Germanic savages.
And Julius Caesar went out and stomped on them and then marched into Rome.
And everybody says, oh, good, let's make him an emperor.
You know, let's make him the emperor.
And that's why the Republicans killed him, basically.
The people who believed in the Republic killed him to stop that from happening.
Then there was a civil war and then Augustus took over and the Republic was dead.
And when I look at people singing hymns to Barack Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, when I see people following a demagogue blowhard like Donald Trump and screaming anti-Semitic remarks of people who disagree and everybody who disagrees is an idiot and you're an idiot and the way Trump treats people, the fact that he responds with this personal way, I worry about that.
I worry about our tendency to follow demagogues and our tendency to lose the thread of democracy.
That's what happened to the Romans.
The satirical poet Juvenal said that they traded their vote for bread and circuses, which translates very basically into welfare programs and entertainment.
And you can very easily see America trading its vote for bread and circuses.
But, but the other thing that I think about is I think about the British at this moment when they defeated the French, because when the British defeated the French, they became the empire of the century.
That was their main rival.
That was the main rival to their dominance.
And that was the 18th, the 19th century was the British century.
From 1815, which is Waterloo, to 1915, which is World War I, it's a British world and the rest of us were just living in it.
And so we just won this Cold War.
It's an American world.
You know, it would take a lot more than Barack Obama to change that.
This is going to be an American world at least for another century.
We are going to be the dominant power in the world for at least another century, I think.
You know, that's all things being equal, things going the way they are.
And so that reminds me of this.
And the other thing that reminds me of it is that because the British won the war against the French, they managed not to become a revolutionary society.
They managed to become a conservative society, remain a conservative society for the next 20 years.
So after the reaction to the French Revolution, and the British cracked down on writers and people, you know, they arrested writers who had any kind of sense of being revolutionary.
For the next 20 years, they had Tory government.
And we had a revolution in this country, which was the 60s.
And it was a cultural kind of revolution, but it was real.
I mean, everything after the 60s was different than everything before the 60s.
And everything that the 60s preached failed.
Every single thing they did failed.
The multicultural, oh, let's be friendly to the Russians failed.
The socialism failed.
Godlessness failed.
You know, the sexual revolution was an absolute disaster, mostly for women, but it was a disaster really for everybody.
Everything they did failed.
And in reaction to that, we had the Reagan Revolution.
We had mostly conservative governance.
So there was Jimmy Carter, he failed.
Then we had mostly conservative governance from Reagan through Clinton, basically.
But the French Revolution happened because the ideas that preceded it, the religious ideas, the monarchical ideas, had crumbled.
Those ideas had crumbled, and the French Revolution was this savage, bloody, ugly way of clearing them out of the way.
It didn't have to be that way.
It wasn't that way in America, but it was that way in France.
Those ideas had crumbled, and so the civilization came down from below.
The same thing is true in America.
Things changed.
The role of women changed.
It changed.
I hate feminism because it degrades homemaking and motherhood, which I think are the most important professions.
But I don't hate the fact that a woman who wants to be a doctor can be a doctor.
I don't hate the fact that a woman who wants to play baseball can play baseball, or whatever.
That stuff, the stuff that makes us more free as individuals, I like.
And that stuff just was coming down the pike.
The cultural unity that marked the 50s after World War II just came to an end.
It was over.
And the 60s were just a reaction to that, really.
And it was an ugly reaction.
It got out of control.
The ideas that came up were bad ideas.
But some of them were permanent, and some of them changed.
And so Barack Obama has taken, has come up when a lot of that change is finally coming to fruition.
A lot of the things, he has been a divisive, smug, mean-spirited president.
There's no question about it.
But he has been a symbol of change that would have happened whether he was there or not.
He could not have been any more divisive, smug, and dishonest about gay marriage, but he didn't bring about gay marriage.
It was awful that it came about through the tyranny of judges on the Supreme Court.
It was awful that it came about that way.
It was a terrible, terrible, stupid mistake.
It was coming anyway.
It was coming anyway.
And whether God approves of gay marriage or not is not the question because the government is not God.
The government doesn't speak for God.
It doesn't have anything to do with what God wants, except in the sense of doing the right thing.
The government is there to leave us alone, and it is in keeping with the American principles that gay people be left alone.
And by the way, as far as I can tell, there's nothing in the Gospels that tells me to care about other people's sex lives.
The stuff that tells me to care about my sex life, and my sex life is great, by the way.
You should live so long.
No, I'm joking.
But there's nothing in the Bible that says I have to worry about what other people are doing.
And so that was coming anyway.
The corruption of journalism, the corruption of journalism, so that they actually simply don't report things that affect the Democrats.
So the mainstream media has become openly, openly pro-democratic.
That was on its way.
And when a black president got elected, so they had that racial pathology where they couldn't attack him, and he was a leftist, so they couldn't attack him.
This administration has not been reported on on network news.
You have not seen this administration happen on network news.
You have seen it happen on the Drudge Report and on other, on blogs, and in rebel journalism.
But it hasn't happened on the mainstream news.
Last night I was having a chat with my friend Michael Knowles, who now does some work for the Daily Wire, which is why everything has gotten so much better here, I'm sure.
And Michael was saying, maybe it's a good thing that back in the 60s, the press pretended to be objective, but they were actually left-wing.
Now they're just openly corrupt and scurrilous.
And maybe that is better.
That's like a Lance Boyle.
But for me, it would be better if they would hire about 50% conservative reporters and editors and try and report the news fairly, try and report it fair and balanced, as Fox says, and then ignores their own slogan.
But they don't on the Brett Baer report.
That Brett Baer is really the best half hour of news on television.
And if all news looked like that, I think we'd be a lot better off.
All right, so those are things that were happening anyway, and Obama made them worse, and Obama may have greased the wheels, but it wasn't him.
And the third thing, of course, has been our educational system.
The left took over our educational system.
Why we let that happen, I'm not so, I wonder about, but we did.
And now kids have lost the thread.
We used to teach civics in class.
We used to explain to people why, what natural law it was that made freedom, liberty, individual liberty, Republican government, what made that good?
Not what made it effective.
What made it good?
Because one of the arguments on the left, the left is always saying, well, government does good things.
That's true.
Kings do good things.
Fascists do good things.
Dictators do good things.
A lot of people do good things.
It's freedom.
Freedom is a good per se.
It is a good in and of itself.
And we have stopped teaching people that.
So all that stuff, all that stuff has happened and been exacerbated under Obama's watch.
But he didn't cause it.
He simply, it's idolatry to look at him and hate him for something that was already happening and that just blossomed.
Again, smug, mean, divisive, also, you know, just completely ignorant of how the world works.
All that stuff, true, but not the agent of those changes.
He is not the agent of those changes.
So let's just look at a couple of really quick clips from the State of the Union things.
And just let me tell my reaction to them quickly, all right?
Give me the one that's like a few seconds on the financial crisis.
Food stamp recipients did not cause the financial crisis.
Recklessness on Wall Street did.
Yeah, recklessness on Wall Street and government policies that encouraged food stamp recipients to think that they could own a house.
I mean, it was like, just left that little part, left that part of the sentence off, okay?
So it was left-wing Democrat government policies that encouraged people who couldn't afford houses to buy houses, to get mortgages, which Wall Street then misused.
So just a little bit of truth to fill that in.
All right, give me the one on climate.
You're a little over a year from now.
If anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it.
You will be pretty lonely because you'll be debating our military, most of America's business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it's a problem and intend to solve it.
All right.
I just want to mention the nasty tone there because the big lead on this story was he was calling for more civility.
This is a guy who, remember, called the opponents of his Iran deal.
He said they essentially have the same mindset as the terrorists.
So anybody who thought we shouldn't give Iran nuclear weapons, you know, had the same mindset of this terrorist.
This is a guy who does that all the time.
He's been one of the nastiest, most divisive presidents ever.
And he mentioned that.
He actually copped that.
He said that the world, the country is more divided than when he took office and then made a very kind of snide reference to Lincoln and Roosevelt sort of reminding us that it was divided then, kind of making his claim to greatness.
So let's just hear a little bit of his peroration, his inspiring, uplifting thing that he ended with.
The last part.
A little over a year from now, when I no longer hold this office, I will be right there with you as a citizen.
Inspired by those voices of fairness and vision, of grit and good humor and kindness that have helped America travel so far.
Voices that help us see ourselves not first and foremost as black or white or Asian or Latino, not as gay or straight, immigrant or native born, not Democrat or Republican, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed.
Is there anybody in America?
Can we find anybody in America who's not wearing a white sheet over his head who has referred to Americans more as black and white, gay and straight, and set us more against each other than this guy?
And that really is, it really is offensive to have him come out and do this.
Miki Halley, government governor of South Carolina, came out and gave the response.
And I have to say, she has beautiful teeth.
The woman has exceptional teeth.
And why Republic, you know, she attacks Donald Trump, essentially, without mentioning his name.
I attack Donald Trump.
I think Trump's an idiot.
You know, I think he's a terrible, I think he's a danger to our republic.
I really do.
But, but, keep your eye on the ball.
You know, the opposition party just took the biggest bully pulpit on earth and made a speech telling us how great everything is.
And she couldn't respond to that.
You know, she had to tell us how bad Donald Trump is and how we have to share.
The Republicans have to share some of the blame.
I mean, come on, it's politics.
It ain't beanbag.
You know, it's just, it just was, it's just offensive that our guys don't know how to fight.
And that is part of the thing that drives, that is driving the right crazy.
I'm going to read something from the Wall Street Journal, and it's long, and I'll try to edit it as I go, but it's so concise, and it's what Nikki Haley should have said.
It really is good.
And I just, so this is, and it really does sum up my response to Obama, so it's just worth reading.
As he begins his final year in office, President Obama's legacy project is already in high gear.
This includes Tuesday Night's State of the Union, which is best understood as the start of a campaign to persuade Americans that the last seven years have been better than they believed.
Because remember, like 65% of the country at least think we're going in the wrong direction.
65%.
All right, so Obama needs to start early because this reality makeover won't be easy.
Start with the economy, which Mr. Obama's Boswells are attempting to reframe as a boom.
Mr. Obama certainly inherited a deep recession, but recessions always end and deep ones usually rebound faster and higher.
The test of economic policy is the pace and quality of the recovery.
This one, the slowest recovery since World War II.
The jobless rate has fallen to 5%, but in May 2007, under George W. Bush, it was 4.4%.
Today's rate has been able to fall as low as it has, in part because so many working-age Americans have left the workforce.
The labor participation rate of 62.6% hasn't been this low since 1977.
Real incomes for most households have only recently begun to rise above what they were at the end of the recession in June 2009.
So pay is stagnant and people are out of work.
Need To Fix Culture00:13:17
If you don't believe us, listen to the Democrat presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and that other guy are all bemoaning the economic plight of the middle class and offering new government ministrations.
Perhaps they know they'd sound silly if they talked about an Obama boom.
Okay, his last year, oh, and then the president's defenders blame slow growth on Republican opposition, yet he has achieved most of what he sought on the economy.
He passed his stimulus, he raised taxes, he transformed one-sixth of the economy with Obamacare and the financial system via Dodd-Frank.
He nationalized student loans, regulated the internet, and is redoing electricity markets to crush coal.
All of this and more have combined to inhibit growth.
His last year isn't likely to change this arc short of a recession.
Obamacare is falling apart.
I mean, this is one of the uncovered news stories.
Half of the Obamacare exchanges have collapsed.
The biggest insurers are losing money.
They're stuck with all the sick people as we knew they would be.
It's going to be gutted.
Obamacare is going to need to be gutted and reshaped.
They may still call it Obamacare.
If a Democrat takes office, they'll still call it Obamacare.
If a Republican takes office, they'll throw it out.
But it's going to be thrown out one way or another.
And it matters how they fix it, but still.
Mr. Obama also claimed foreign policy success, but with little connection to reality anywhere in the world.
His failure to intervene left Syria to become what former CIA Director David Petraeus calls a geopolitical Chernobyl, spreading chaos throughout the Middle East.
It nurtured Islamic State, which has swamped Europe with refugees and inspiring jihadists.
Did we play the one about war?
Play Obama on the war.
I am now carefully reviewing our policies in both wars.
This war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.
The Iraq war is coming to an end.
As the tide of war recedes, a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa.
And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan.
That wasn't the one I wanted to play.
I wanted to play the one on ISIL.
Do you have that?
Yeah, play that.
Go ahead.
As we focus on destroying ISIS, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.
Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plodding in apartments or garages, they pose an enormous danger to civilians.
They have to be stopped, but they do not threaten our national existence.
You know, this guy has set the Middle East on fire.
He's given Iran a path to a nuclear weapon, and he's telling us, you know, don't look over there.
Don't worry.
Everything is fine.
You know, a guy in a pickup truck can be firing a nuclear weapon off his shoulder.
You know, I mean, it's like, it's just, do the Islamic terrorists at this moment threaten our national existence?
No, but that's a hell of a no, you know, that's a hell of a mark to have to hit.
You know, how many people have to die before he's held responsible for not protecting American lives?
How many people have to die over there?
How many Christian communities have to be wiped out in the Middle East before we say, gee, these are our co-religionists being wiped out?
How many women have to be raped and imprisoned and enslaved before it's his fault?
You know, before he's supposed to do something.
He's not supposed to stand loftily and tell us, don't worry, you personally are not going to be killed.
Your country's not going to be killed.
I mean, he's supposed to fight back, and he hasn't, and he's made things worse.
All right.
See, here's the thing about the Obama presidency.
All this stuff has to be fixed.
He has hurt.
It's been a mediocre, not a mediocre, it's been a bad presidency.
It's been a failed presidency.
If it had destroyed America, I would call it transformative.
That's the only way a bad presidency can really be transformative because everything else is going to have to be fixed.
Our military, he's made our military weak.
It's going to have to be made stronger.
It will be made stronger.
Frankly, even if Hillary Clinton is elected, it's going to be made stronger because we need it to defend ourselves against the threat from China and the threat from Islam.
So like, you know, that's going to be fixed.
Obamacare, it's going to have to be fixed.
You can't have a system that just collapses like that.
It matters how it's fixed, and that's what this election is about.
Is it going to be parlayed into single-payer European-style healthcare that's going to bankrupt us and make our research and development stagnate to a stop?
Or are we going to go back to free market principles and solve it that way?
That's going to be a problem, but it's going to have to be fixed.
Everything that he's done, everything he's laid his hand on is going to have to be fixed.
And that's a bad presidency, but it's not a transformative presidency.
This has happened, it happens probably more often than not.
More often than not, you get these guys who really don't know what they're doing, and they don't make things good.
And the thing about a good president is you only need one Reagan.
You only need eight years of Reagan to get a quarter century of prosperity.
That's all you need.
And look at New York.
New York was on the verge of falling apart.
You only needed one mayor, one mayor, Giuliani, to turn it around, and it's been great ever since.
Now it's going back because it has a bad mayor.
It's too bad.
It's a shame.
It's a shame what Obama has done to this country.
It's a shame that he's reignited racial animus that was dying away.
It's a shame, but it's not transformative.
It can be fixed, and it'll have to be fixed.
Nobody is going to take office.
Nobody, not even Bernie Sanders, is going to take office and continue these policies because they don't work.
And I just think this is a bad guy who knows how to get under your skin.
He knows how to make you think he's more important than he is.
The press has been battering you about how historic he is.
The color of his skin is historic.
Really is in the context of history.
But what he's done is not historic.
It's just bad leftist policy.
It's like you can't, you can't, you know, you can't just like live out your fears.
The question is: what are we going to do?
Because what are we going to do about the things that change?
How are we going to have conservatism that deals with the sexual revolution?
How are we going to have a conservatism in a world where people can sleep with robots?
When people can actually have operations that do turn them into the opposite sex.
What is our conservatism going to look like?
And I'd like to suggest just three things, three important things.
One, this education thing.
We've let it go.
It's insane.
We have to remember, we have to teach kids the principles that make them free, the principles that keep them free.
And part of that is learning to preach our religion to people who think.
It doesn't mean compromising on religion.
It doesn't mean compromising on social issues.
It means learning to preach them to people who think, learning to preach them without rage, learning to preach them without hammering your fist into your hand.
This is not talking about politics.
This is talking about the culture.
That means making movies, starting magazines, television shows that say what we need to say.
We have let this go too long with our emergency idea that everything is an emergency.
We are constantly rushing off to an emergency.
And thirdly, and this is happening, thank heavens, we have to take back journalism.
We have to hammer these guys.
It is not right that a network TV governed by the FCC on the public airways has a Democrat hack as its chief anchor.
George Stephanopoulos is that's not right.
And we should say so, and we should say so every time we're on the air, and we should say so in interviews.
Journalism, education, entertainment, we have to learn that we really are in a niche culture.
That culture of unity of the 50s and 60s is gone.
It's gone.
And so what does that mean?
Because a government that can stop you from sleeping with who you want to sleep with is too powerful a government.
So if you want to preach sexual morality, you've got to preach it and you've got to live it and you've got to make it look good.
You've got to make it look good, pal.
You know, if you're sitting there, you know, bunched up and you know, I don't sleep with anybody but my wife, you know, and you're not happy about that, you're not preaching anything to anybody.
Conservatives have got to learn where, what is government's duty, which is the economy and defense, basically, and what is the duty of the society.
You know, we have to learn to act in the society.
It shouldn't be us who wants the government to outlaw gays.
If you don't like gays, go make your argument.
Make your argument.
Tell me why.
Tell me why the guy who wrote the play I like can't be with the guy who wrote the movie I like and have that life.
You can explain it to me, but just don't throw your Bible at me.
Explain it to me.
I've read the Bible too a lot and I believe in it, but you've got to explain it to me.
If you can't preach those things as moral goods, shut up.
That's the thing.
And so what I would like to see is I would like to see a conservatism that divides what has to be preached and what has to be governed.
And that's, I think, the way forward, because we have to understand we're living in a much more libertarian world.
We're living in a much more niche culture.
It ain't going away.
Obama didn't cause it.
It's here for a long, long time, and we're going to have to deal with it.
Now, stuff I like.
Now, you know how when you go into a job interview and they ask you what your biggest flaw is, you're supposed to say, well, my biggest flaw is I work too hard.
My biggest flaw is I give too much to the company I work for.
My biggest flaw is I forget to plug my own stuff.
When I grew up, you weren't supposed to do that.
And kind of the world of the internet has made that necessary.
So let me, I'm going to plug myself twice today for all the times that I haven't plugged myself.
I'm going to plug myself twice.
First, I want you to go out and buy a copy of Game Over, the final book in the Mind War trilogy.
It's a young adult sci-fi adventure.
It's really good, you know?
I mean, I'm probably one of the best adventure story writers living.
If you're not reading me, you're reading worse stuff.
Buy game over for the young adult in your life.
And if you're an adult and you want something harsher and dirtier, buy werewolf cop.
That's for adults.
Now, stuff I like.
I've been doing crime stories that you haven't read or seen.
And this is also going to be a plug for me because I'm plugging a book called Shock to the System, written by my good friend Simon Brett.
Great writer.
Simon, British writer, he writes, and this is stuff I would say to his face.
He writes stuff that's a little soft for me.
A lot of his books are what they call in the business, they call them cozy mysteries.
He'll write a book about Mrs. Pargeter, who solves mysteries out in a little British village.
You know, and I'm with Ed McBain, the great tough guy, American mystery writer, said, I don't read those books because when I see a murder, I call the police, not an old woman who knits.
But Simon also writes a very good series about a guy named Charles Parris, who's an actor, very funny, cynical, witty.
However, his best novel is called Shock to the System.
And it's about a businessman who finds, a disappointed businessman who finds the best way to rise through the ranks is to kill people and just get them out of your way.
It was made into a terrific movie with a script by me.
And it really was, you know, I have had two scripts made into movies.
I've had a bunch of books made into movies, but I've had two scripts that I wrote made into movies.
One was a hit movie that's still making money that was awful.
And the script was good, but it just didn't come out well.
It's just the way those things happen.
That was called One Missed Call.
And one was a movie that just did not do well, but was really, really good.
And that's just life.
I mean, it's in a lot of any book you see that's called 100 Great Films You Haven't Seen, 100 Great Films You Missed.
Shock to the System is usually in it.
It's with Michael Caine and Peter Riegert and Elizabeth McGovern.
I think it was one of her first roles.
I remember sitting with her after at the rap party, and she's now the mother on Downton Abbey.
And I remember sitting with her and saying, well, have you got a next job?
And she said no.
And I said, you will, you know, because she was really terrific.
Play a scene.
There's one scene.
These are the businessmen.
It's the 90s.
They're sitting around trying to get in touch with their own greed.
Jones has got to announce a promotion Friday.
That's what I heard, Friday.
It's the least they can do.
Give you a couple of days to celebrate.
Two glorious days, three fun-filled nights.
And how will you fill those fun-filled nights, Mr. Marshall?
Well, right now, I'm planning to have the wife's mother over to berate me for not letting her live with us.
Oh, hmm, my choice.
That reminds me.
We're putting the boat in this weekend.
Oh, and we forgot ours, didn't we?
Tara's coming out to the house.
Tara?
What kind of a name is that?
Her last name is Raboom D.A.
The man is dating a plantation.
Gentlemen, gentlemen, you don't understand.
We are the young, the proud.
We shouldn't be ashamed of success.
We should say, yes.
I have a boat.
I have a country home.
I have a girlfriend named Tara.
Say it with me, brothers.
I do have a Mercedes.
I have a condo with a pool.
I have a personal sports trainer.
I have a wife, a mortgage, and two ducks.
God bless and keep the old-fashioned family.
Here, here.
Cynical, nasty crime movie, my favorite kind.
I wrote it, I should know.
Shock to the system.
Read the excellent novel by Simon Brett, and then watch the excellent movie written by me.