Andrew Clavin dissects how "white leftist guilt" fuels divisive narratives, targeting Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reparations push and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Oscar boycott as misguided identity politics. He contrasts this with Bernie Sanders’ pragmatic community investments while mocking performative activism like DeRay Mckesson’s anti-capitalist rhetoric. Clavin argues Trump’s rise stems from populist anger, not conservatism, warning that coalitions must prioritize freedom over outrage—echoing Rocky Balboa’s resilience. The episode ends with a lyrical detour praising Oscar-winning lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman, framing perseverance as the antidote to systemic excuses. [Automatically generated summary]
President Obama, where he refuses even to use the term of what's going on.
I said, what's going on?
We have to find out what is going on.
What the hell is going on?
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
That was courtesy of the Huffington Post, Donald Trump covering Marvin Gaye, and what is going on?
What is going on?
Well, this is the last show of the week already.
I know.
It's just like zip by, and the rest of the week for you is just a drear, clavinless experience with nothing.
You know, it's just nothing will make any sense for the next three days.
You know, Friday, Saturday.
It's like events will just pop up and disappear.
You know, faces will fly by.
It'll be, you know, drift by.
It'll be like the opening of the Twilight Zone.
Nothing.
You know, I can't quite really make any sense of anything.
But then we'll come back and we'll explain it.
But what is going on as we reach the end of this week?
I thought this was kind of a dreary political week.
I mean, I think it was the Sarah Palin thing.
We lost a kind of conservative icon and she went over to the dark side of this kind of demagoguery and all this.
However, I will say this.
I'm going to toot my own horn.
The stuff we have been saying here for months, really, is now starting to just now starting to filter into the mainstream.
I mean, yesterday we talked about all the leaks that came out about Hillary Clinton on one day, and I was saying, you know, this really does sound like there's another shoe about to drop that the Obama administration is basically signaling to us that they're going to throw her under the bus if a bad report comes in from the FBI.
And yesterday I'm watching Fox and they're basically reporting on her leaving the race.
Now they've gone too far.
They've actually leapt ahead to what may happen.
And the other thing that is finally coming out, you know, Rush Limbaugh, you will never hear a bad word from me about Rush Limbaugh ever, because I just think he is not just the kind of granddaddy of commentators.
I think he is the best.
You know, he is really, really good.
And just now, just now, he's starting to talk about what we've been talking about.
I say this as a point of pride for me, that he's starting to talk about what the Donald Trump rise really means and what we're seeing.
I'll get back to that in a minute.
I'm going to talk about the political landscape, and I really have to get to this kind of fresh outbreak of racial pathology that is breaking out among our creative elites, among my friends in the culture.
It's just a really horrible thing that's happening because it's so bad for the people it's supposed to help, and the people that it does help are the people who don't need the help.
And it's just, it's awful.
So we'll get to that.
But first, let me just take this kind of farewell look at the political landscape for the week after this difficult week.
Rush Limbaugh says this, and this was in the, I think the Daily Caller had it.
He says, the Trump triumph, the Trump coalition, is exposing the fact that it isn't conservative orthodoxy or conservatism or any of the hard work of the conservative elite that is causing people to be conservative.
Limbaugh goes on, he says, it's something really simple.
They're fed up with the modern-day Democratic Party.
The Republican Party establishment does not understand this.
They do not know who their conservative voters are.
They've overestimated their conservatism.
They're not liberals.
They're not Democrat.
Many of them do not want to be thought of as conservatives for a host of reasons.
So somebody who comes along and is able to convey that he or she understands why they're angry and furthermore is going to do everything to fix it is going to own them.
What's happened here is that nationalism, dirty word, ooh, people hate it, and populism, even dirtier word, nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal.
And that's exactly what we've been saying here, I think, for two months.
I've been trying to get across the fact that the people, the divide is not between conservatism and liberals.
It's between conservatism and liberals and the nationalists and the populace who have just about had it.
Okay?
And that's dispiriting for those of us who love liberty, because that's not what they, you know, one of the things that I think Rush, I hate to say, I won't say he got it wrong, but perhaps he put it in a way that I wouldn't have put it when he says, you know, when he kind of was making fun of nationalism being a dirty word and populism being a dirty word, they are dirty words.
They are dirty words.
And, you know, all of life's wisdom, as we know, is in the movies, right?
So we will turn to men in black to find out why that's wrong.
Let's just listen to this famous scene from Men in Black.
Humans, for the most part, don't have a clue.
They don't want one or need one either.
They're happy.
They think they have a good bead on things.
But why write a big secret?
People are smart.
They can handle it.
The person is smart.
People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.
See, this is the problem with populism, okay?
The things that are popular are not always the things that are good.
And the things that are popular are almost always in politics.
They're almost always based on anger.
Politics is an anger-based system, because in order to get people off their butts, they have to be outraged.
They have to be angry.
And every time I keep saying anger is the devil's cocaine, and people, I get this tweets and emails like, anger is important.
Nobody does anything until they're really angry.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that's true.
I mean, you can act out of principle.
You simply act because it's the right thing to do.
And they're confusing.
I mean, every emotion has a good version and a bad version.
And of course, there's a kind of anger that is righteous.
But the problem with anger is it always feels like righteousness.
And so you feel really good when you're angry.
You know, it makes you feel like, yes, you know, I have got this, I have got this.
And when Donald Trump can't solve your problems, and he can't solve your problems because he's just a crony capitalist who's going to make peace with whoever comes, you know, whoever has got the power, whoever's going to give him power.
When he can't solve your problems, all he's got left is your anger.
And so he's got to make you angrier and angrier and angrier.
And that was what you heard in Sarah Palin's voice yesterday.
That screeching, horrible voice that was not always her voice, you know.
All she's got left is that anger because she feels that she now hasn't got the power, you know, to make, to change events.
And so they'll just keep stoking that anger.
That's all he'll do.
For those of us who love freedom, here is some actual wisdom.
And I know it's actual wisdom because it doesn't come from me.
Lord Acton was a famous writer about freedom.
He was a 19th century historian.
And he's famous for the line, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But one of the best things I think he ever said, he said, at all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare.
And its triumphs, freedom's triumphs, have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own.
So in other words, they had to make coalitions.
Freedom lovers had to make coalitions with people who wanted other things.
And this association, this coalition, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous by giving to opponents just ground of opposition to freedom and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
So just to unpack this, to make it relevant to our life, many of us feel that, for instance, American black people have been absolutely destroyed by government largesse and the government in basically trying to buy them off and buy off their cities and pour programs and money into their cities have essentially enslaved them to a pathology,
to bad actions, to family disintegration, to not elevating work as a value, to not elevating family as a value.
Those of us who love freedom feel that way and feel that they should be given less, feel that they should be given more inspiration and more things that channel them into work and into family and all that.
The guy next to us who hates black people, who's a racist, may feel the same way.
He may want the same things.
We may have to form a coalition with that guy to get the votes we need to cut back the government that's destroying black people.
So then you're stuck with this racist and you've opened yourself up to the charges that, of course, no leftist would ever, of course, think of charging a conservative with being a racist.
But that's why they get away with it.
And they, yes.
So you say, well, yeah, you're calling me a racist, but you destroyed Detroit.
You destroyed Baltimore.
You're destroying Chicago.
The Democrats are the worst thing that ever happened to African Americans.
The Democrats are the worst thing that ever, they are the nightmare of African Americans and have been since before the Civil War.
They always were, they always have been, they always will be, and yet they call us racist and it sticks.
Why?
Because we're for freedom and nobody likes freedom.
That's what Lord Acton is telling you.
Nobody likes freedom.
Why?
Because the Poles don't like it on either side because they want power.
That's who they are.
They want power over your lives and you want to be free.
You want to say that, give them less power.
The rich don't like it because they want to be in control.
More government there is, the more government that it is, the better it is for the rich.
So the rich are always the people of big government because big government keeps the little guy down.
It just always does.
And the poor don't like it because they want the free stuff.
They think they need, they've been told and told and told that they need this free stuff.
And that's what the powerful are parlaying into power.
So nobody wants freedom.
It takes stuff away from everybody.
And the guy who says, I'm for freedom, is going to be a lonely guy and it's going to have to form a coalition.
And what I've been advocating for, what I've been advocating for guys who believe in freedom, like I think Cruz, Ted Cruz, you know, he's a politician, he wants power, but I think his policies and his ideas are freedom-based ideas.
And what I'm advocating is for people like him to make a coalition with this angry group that is following Trump, to make a coalition with the working man because they have genuinely been screwed by the left who hates them.
They hate the white working class.
There's no one they hate more than the white blue-collar worker.
They just despise them.
You know, that's the guy that those are the guys that Obama says are clinging to their guns.
And when the feminists talk about the patriarchy, these are the guys who supported their families and built the country.
These are the guys they want to throw under the bus.
And the right ignores them because the right doesn't understand how ticked off they are.
And they give them economic and capitalist theory while they're saying, hey, I can't feed my family.
I've been left out in the cold.
So what I'm saying is we make common core.
We stick to our principles.
We stick to our principles, but we make a coalition.
When you make a coalition, you have to compromise because politics is the art of compromise.
William F. Buckley always said, pick the most conservative candidate who can win.
And to me, the most conservative candidate who can win will be the guy who makes common cause with these disaffected workers and says, okay, if government has to do something, let it do something smart.
Let's get rid of college loans that drive people into debt so they can get a degree in feminist anger.
Let's get rid of that.
That's not doing anything for anybody.
Let's get rid of public service unions that force you to pay them money so that they can then elect the guys who will force you to pay the money so they can elect the guys who will force you to pay the money, and thereby bankrupt the cities as a bankrupting the entire state of California.
Let's get rid of all that and just build training systems for people who are thrown out of the old economy so they can get into the new economy.
Let's put together things that will keep your families together, that'll encourage small businesses.
Let's get rid of all those regulations that make it hard for Uber to pick you up at the airport and set them free.
Let's get rid of all those licenses that mean if you want to start a hair salon in your home, you have to get a light.
Why does a hair stylist need a license?
What are you going to do?
Kill somebody, you know, with a scissors?
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Those are the regulations that need to go away, and those are the things that we can do for people that won't be saying to them, Oh, don't worry, I'm going to help this millionaire and he's going to hire you, because the millionaire is going to hire a Chinese guy who's going to do it for 15 cents.
You know, do what you would do for $3, he's going to do for 15 cents.
And they get that.
They get that.
And it's no good saying that helps the global economy if I'm out of work.
So I'm just saying, you know, pay attention, pay attention to what they're angry about and find freedom-loving systems to help them.
You know, I used to watch my kids, they used to have this game they would play with Fortune cookies.
And you'd open the fortune cookie, and whatever the fortune cookie said, you would add in bed.
So it says, if it would say, you're going to get lucky, you would say, in bed.
Ha ha ha.
There were little kids that made them laugh.
But I feel that our fortune cookie should say, and keep us free.
So I'm going to help the working class, but also keep us free.
I'm going to do all this stuff, but also keep us free.
And if we keep that ahead, we can make any kind of coalition we want.
Likely Rubio Win00:05:03
All right.
So where have we ended up?
Let's look at our political landscape.
I just want to show you why I feel mainstream commentary is so bad.
Okay, here's Mark Halperin.
He's the guy from Time magazine, big-time commentator.
Here he is looking at the landscape up ahead.
At this point, if you said, of all the people in the race, who's the one most likely to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, today you'd have to say it's Trump.
And I think if he wins the vote, despite what I said before about Cruz possibly coming back in South Carolina, Trump could end Trump could effectively end this tonight of the New Hampshire primary.
At this point, you look at the latest poll out of New Hampshire tonight, you look at what's going on in Iowa, where we've seen on the ground in the polling momentum for Bernie Sanders.
Trump right now is the most likely person to win both the first two and to, again, be really well poised to run the table.
You look at the polls, he says, the latest polls in the Des Moines Register show that 56% of likely Iowa people likely to show up at the Iowa caucuses, 56% have not made up their mind.
56%, this is now a week and a half away.
If 56% of the people likely to show up have not made up their mind, the polls mean zero.
Because if more than half of the people haven't said anything or haven't made up their mind, that means that the people who have made up their mind or who are talking to the pollsters are probably the most intense, most committed people, or probably more extreme.
So there's probably a lot of people going to show up who are much more moderate than the people who are talking to the pollsters.
So let's not forget that at the exact same time we are now, last time, so that's four years ago, the guy leading the Iowa polls was Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich was leading the Iowa polls two weeks out last time.
And one week out, Romney, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and Gingrich were all in a three-way tie.
And who won?
You remember?
Rick Santorum won.
And the only thing that happened after that was Rick Santorum won, but the results were so long delayed that they didn't come out before the New Hampshire primary, so they didn't affect the primary, and Santorum lost his momentum.
It's a guy named Henry Olson.
I don't want to, you know, some of this stuff comes from him and reading him, but I do agree with him a lot.
He's at National Review.
I just don't want to seem like I'm stealing his jokes as we were talking about Amy Schumer.
I don't want to pull an Amy Schumer.
Some of this comes directly from him, and he's really worth reading.
But he points out that, and in fact, Ted Cruz has also pointed this out, that with Ted Cruz and Trump fighting, that's a good thing for the more moderate candidates.
Ted Cruz said this.
He said, the best thing that can happen to the establishment, what he deems the establishment, is for Cruz and Trump to get into a cage match.
That's what he said.
Now they're in a cage match.
The Sarah Palin thing throws them into a cage match, and that means that somebody else, that means that some of their support is going to bleed away and a third candidate can come.
Marco Rubio, very quietly, nobody's pointing this out, but Marco Rubio very quietly has saved all his money and is pouring it in to ads in the east of Iowa because that's where all the moderates are.
Okay?
And so Olson is paying attention to this.
And I really do believe that the end result, that what we are seeing, the end result of what we're seeing with Sarah Palin, is that it makes it more likely that Rubio is going to win Iowa.
And if that happens decisively and it happens quickly, it's just going to, I'm not saying it will happen.
I'm just saying it makes it more likely.
And if it does happen, it's going to upend the narrative completely because it might have an effect on New Hampshire.
And then going forward, everything changes because that's where the money flows.
Remember, a lot of the money is controlled.
Ted Cruz is an anomaly.
He's been raising a lot of money behind the scenes really well, really smart.
Trump is an anomaly because he has his own money.
The establishment controls a lot of money.
The big Republican donors love the establishment.
They are the establishment, basically, the big Republican donors.
And so if they see Rubio rising, if they see Kasich rising, that I find hard to believe, but if they see Kasich or Rubio or even Chris Christie rising, that's where the money is going to go.
And so it'll just change the whole thing.
So I just think things are really up in the air, much more so than when you see a guy like Halfran going, oh, Trump's going to run the table.
Trump is poised to run the table.
That's because he's paying attention to national polls, which mean nothing, and to Iowa polls, which mean nothing because people haven't, for the simple, honest reason, I'm not saying the polls are bad.
I think the polls are good.
I just don't think that they have recorded, they can record people who haven't made up their mind.
And if that's 56% of the people, they don't mean anything.
All right, that's my last thing I'm going to say about the political race this week.
Next week, more things will happen, and it'll be even more confusing.
I have to talk about this thing that's happening in the arts, in the creative sphere, let's call it.
Obviously, we talked before, and I'm not going to go back over it.
We talked before about this Oscar thing, which I just think is such a big mistake.
White Privilege and Reparations00:12:37
Jatapinka Smith apparently got a little ticked off that Will Smith didn't get nominated for an Oscar for concussion, and she made this hyper, hyper-serious thing about, oh, we have to boycott it.
This is catching on.
Michael Moore, of course, of course, Michael Moore would get on the bandwagon, except the bandwagon would collapse under the weight of Michael Moore if he got on it.
So he can't do that.
But Spike Lee is into it, and every, oh, George Clooney, and it's all this stuff.
And I just feel it's a big mistake because there's so many talented people of all colors in L.A.
I mean, this is where they all come.
This is where, you know, showbiz happens, so they all come out here.
To start saying you have to give awards to black people just makes them affirmative action awards and takes away from their legitimacy, even if the guy deserves it.
And I just think that's a terrible thing.
The guy I want to talk about, though, is Tanahisi Coates, who has just been cleaning up.
He has won every possible award.
He won the MacArthur Genius Grant.
He won the National Book Award.
This week, he became a finalist for the Book Critic Circle.
So if you win both the Book Critic Circle and the National Book Award as an author, you have cleaned up.
I think he is a very, very muddy thinker.
And he has that thing that white intellectuals love in black people where they talk in these kind of elaborate terms and you can't really make out what they're saying.
You can't really figure out what they're saying.
And people, I mean, I remember one of these professors, I can't remember which one it was, just coming on the Bill Maher show and just spouting.
utter nonsense with these 50 cent words, you know, that went on and on.
And Maher just saying, that is so articulate.
That was the word he used.
And so, you know, because the articulate black man is like an old cliche.
And the white intellectuals just love this stuff.
And Tanahisi Coates is charming and he looks like a perfectly lovely fellow.
But he doesn't think clearly.
And his big thing, first of all, he wrote this kind of letter to his son where he tells his son, he basically takes his given all the Black Lives Matter stuff about police killing black people, which has almost all been disproved.
I mean, it's just not true.
The police are getting a bad, bad rap here.
They have done wonders in bringing down crime in the black community.
It's now skyrocketing, and this story is being buried by the left-wing press.
It's skyrocketing because of Black Lives Matter and Obama and his Justice Department putting these guys on the hook, making them feel like if they defend themselves, if they pull the trigger, if they uphold the law, making the police feel that they'll be under the gun and their careers will be destroyed.
And so the criminals are running rampant.
And crime after falling and falling and falling because of new policing methods is starting to skyrocket because the Justice Department and Obama have tied their hands.
It's a terrible thing to do because who are the victims in these neighborhoods?
It's not, you know, it's not rich guys.
It's not, you know, Warren Buffett.
It's the black guys who, the honest black people who make up the majority of the people in those neighborhoods, the vast majority, of course, are honest, regular people just trying to get by.
And they're the people who are getting shot.
They're the people who are getting robbed because the police are being hamstrung.
So Tanahisi Coates has this thing where he takes all this stuff as just absolute truth.
Redlining among lenders also has been disproved, largely disproved.
He takes it all as truth and he says to his son, basically, you know, weep, my boy, because this is the world you live in.
And he's been very big on reparations.
That's kind of been his hobby horse, that black people should be, are starting behind the start line because of slavery and oppression and plunder, he calls it.
Let's show that quote.
He just says the history of America is the history of plundering black people.
The basic feature is really, really simple.
Defining our relationship between black America and white America is taking, is plunder, is stealing.
And this is obviously true, I mean, most explicitly in slavery, a period of 250 years.
But it continues after enslavement, into debt peonage and sharecropping in the South, into racial terrorism, where you're talking about the seizing of people's bodies, into through some of the most progressive policy that we erected during the 20th century through our housing legislation, through our GI bill.
Basically, it's just a defining feature in terms of how the two communities have related in our history.
So the relationship between white and blacks is all plunder.
And because of slavery, going back to slavery and going right on through almost today, they've been plundered.
And so they're owed this money.
And since every black person born is somehow connected to every black person who has ever lived somehow, which by the way, Tanahisi Coates says isn't true.
This is why his theory makes no sense.
He says that black people are basically just a creation of white supremacists, that white people created race in order to oppress black people.
So his theory doesn't make any sense, but that's all right.
Let's listen to that voice of common sense and calm and decency, Bernie Sanders.
So help me.
Bernie Sanders, when asked about reparations by, I think, Fusion TV, delivered very simple response, totally wrong in what he wants to do, but totally right on why reparations are a bad idea.
A lot of African Americans are starting to call for reparations for the many years of stolen labor through slavery.
Is that something that you would support as president?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I think it would be, first of all, it's likelihood of getting through a Congress is nil.
Second of all, I think it would be, you know, very divisive.
I think the real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African-American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African-American community, the incarceration rate within the African-American community, we have a lot of work to do.
So I think what we should be talking about is making massive investments in rebuilding our cities, in creating millions of decent paying jobs, in making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and working on childcare.
Basically, targeting our federal resources to the areas that it is needed the most, and where it is needed the most are in impoverished communities, often African-American and Latino.
Tanahese Coates immediately struck back, writing, he writes for The Atlantic a lot of times.
And he says Sanders' anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn't actually understand the argument.
From 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments, federal, state, and local, repeatedly plundered black communities.
Their methods included everything from land theft to redlining to disenfranchisement to convict lease labor to lynching to enslavement to the vending of children.
So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it.
Its great universities were founded on it.
Its early economy was built by it.
Its suburbs were financed by it.
Its deadliest war was the result of it, which is a very strange take on the Civil War.
I assume he means the Civil War by its deadliest war because it was Americans killing Americans.
You know, that's a very, very strange way to take.
But, but this is the thing that is behind this white privilege idea.
Check your privilege.
If you are white, you should feel bad.
You should feel bad because of privilege.
The other day, Stephen Colbert, and Stephen, I hope somebody in CBS is pounding his head against the wall for replacing David Letterman with Stephen Colbert.
I mean, you know, everybody always says that Hollywood is all about money.
But one of the things, that's true, of course.
It's a business.
It should be about money.
It should be about entertaining people so that they give you your money.
That's perfectly good business.
I entertain you, you give me your money in response to my work.
That makes perfect sense.
That's not a bad thing.
When people say, well, you know, Hollywood is just whoring around for money.
That's not whoring.
Whooring is selling your body for money.
Selling your work for money is good.
That's a good thing.
That's capitalism.
You know, that's what money is.
Money is payment for work.
But they are so immersed in their left-wing theology that they really don't know that they are alienating people.
When they put a guy like Stephen Colbert, who is just a flaming left-winger, I mean, the only thing I can agree with him about is that he does seem to be a devout Catholic.
So I'm glad at least he's not an atheist.
I'm glad he's not just like banging into the walls.
But his leftism is just ugly.
And his ratings are tanking because he's not fair to people.
You know, he brings on right-wingers and attacks them, and he brings on left-wingers and just, you know, builds them up.
So here he is with Black Lives Matter leader DeRay McKesson.
And I really dislike the Black Lives Matter movement, but this guy is incredibly charming.
And that's one of the things I want you to watch.
So what Colbert says to him is, I have white privilege because I'm the host of this show.
So let's change places.
So he changes places with DeRay McKesson and lets McKesson ask him the questions.
How are you going to deal with your white privilege?
So, DeRay, Joué, is there anything you'd like to ask me about being white?
Yeah, you know, I'd love to know what you plan to do now that you understand your whiteness a little better to dismantle it.
What am I going to do to dismantle white privilege?
Now that you understand it, what are you going to do?
I don't know if I do understand it.
I can acknowledge it, but I'm not sure if I understand what I can do to dismantle white privilege.
Let's practice.
Let's dialogue.
Let's think about it.
You have a lot of money.
You have a show.
You can't have my money.
And you can't have my show.
Why do you think people are uncomfortable talking about race?
Why do you think white people are uncomfortable talking about race?
Or I can't speak for other white people.
I feel guilty for anyone who does not have the things I have.
And that includes, you know, black people or anyone, because I am so blessed that I think there's always the fear that it'll be taken from you.
And then what can you do to manage that guilt?
Like, what have you found?
I drank a fair amount.
Well, not only was that kind of funny, but there was a lot of unmeaning truth in that.
I mean, Colbert was actually trying to demonstrate to you that you should worry about your white privilege.
He was selling this idea of white privilege.
But when he says, you can't have my money and you can't have my show, what does that leave?
It leaves just this kabuki theater that he's putting on of guilt and preaching to black people that they are under the gun, that they can't achieve because of us, because of something wrong with the system.
They're screwed.
They can't do anything by their own efforts.
We started this week with Rocky Balboa, the fighter, Sylvester Stallone.
I saw the movie Creed, and I talked about winning and losing.
And I talked about how winning and losing in competition are wonderful things because they not only teach you what works and what doesn't work, they teach you what you're willing to do to win and what you're not willing to do.
And they teach you what is worth more than winning and what isn't, where you should compromise to get your win.
I'm going to go back to Rocky.
Here's from the last one, not Creed, Rocky Balboa, where he talks to his son.
Great wisdom.
All life's wisdom is in the movies.
Let's hear what Rocky Balboa has to say.
It's a Tanahisi Coates.
Let me tell you something you already know.
The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.
It's a very mean and nasty place.
And I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
You, me, or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.
But it ain't about how hard you hit.
It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
How much you can take and keep moving forward.
That's how winning is done.
Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth.
But you got to be willing to take the hits and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you want to be because of him or her or anybody.
Cowards do that and that ain't you.
You're better than that.
See, that's what somebody should be saying to the black community.
It's also what somebody should be saying to the conservative community.
And so I'm saying it, okay?
Remember, this was a dreary week.
I know it was.
But, you know, it's not about what the liberals do.
It's not about what Donald Trump does.
It's not about what anybody does.
It's about standing up for freedom and keep moving forward.
It ain't about how hard you hit.
It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
And we have to keep moving forward because freedom is a good per se.
It is a good in and of itself.
And it triumphs over any other good.
You know, when people say government can do good things, tyranny can do good things.
But freedom is the ultimate good.
It is a good per se.
We have to keep moving forward no matter how hard we get hit so that our children can be free because that's what it's all about.
All right, stuff I like.
I always feel like I'm so weak on music because I'm a word guy.
You know, I love the lyrics and my kids are always making fun of me when I say that's a good song and they say, well, you just mean the lyrics are good.
Because it's true.
I mean, I'm not really hearing the tune a lot of the time.
You Must Believe in Spring00:02:09
But I always love this team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
were very, very successful lyric writers back in, I guess, the 60s, 70s, 80s a little bit.
They won, they're now kind of totally forgotten because their songs were always kind of more intelligent and obscure.
But they won the Oscar for Windmills of Your Mind, which was the song in their Thomas Crown affair, the original Thomas Crown affair.
I was at a charity event about five years ago where I was like the celeb and I was talking to people and then I had to sign books afterwards and I'm signing books and someone said, oh, this is for Marilyn, Alan Bergman.
And I looked up and there they were.
There was Marilyn and Alan Bergman.
And, you know, celebrity means nothing to me.
I don't care.
I've met some of the most famous people on earth.
Never bothers me.
I never care.
But this, I really, I love them.
I just love their work.
And I totally lost my stuff.
And I just wrote this inscription in this book.
I can't remember what it was, but I remember it made absolutely no sense.
So they wrote these very sophisticated lyrics.
And one of my favorite songs of theirs, one of their most obscure, it's called You Must Believe in Spring.
And I just love, you know, the best line in it, of course, comes from Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, If Winter Comes, Can Spring Be Far Behind.
But they just incorporate it into this pop lyric so easily.
The opening verse is When lonely feelings chill the meadows of your mind.
Just think if winter comes, can spring be far behind.
Beneath the deepest snows, the secret of a rose is merely that it knows you must believe in spring.
Great lyric.
I love the song.
We ended with Tierney Sutton last week.
I'm going to let her sing this out.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All may yet be well.
We'll find out next week, and I'll be back.
When lonely feelings chill the medoors of your mind.
Just think if winter comes, can spring be far behind Beneath the deepest snows.