Ep. 73’s Andrew Claven mocks New Hampshire’s primary chaos—Trump and Sanders winning amid "heroin-fueled" voters, Sanders’ "fairness" myth, and Clinton’s weak machine politics—while dissecting Trump’s populist contradictions: inflated military promises, Obamacare flip-flops, and authoritarian nationalism. He dismisses progressive Europe’s unsustainable welfare as proof of secular decline, then pivots to Lent’s shadows and Shakespeare in Love, praising Tom Stoppard’s wit over Mark Norman’s fluff while defending Paltrow’s "dumb" charm as a mask for Shakespeare’s gender-fluid genius. Ends by equating Trump’s and Obama’s rule as liberty-killers, insisting real freedom—like Elizabeth I’s poetic defiance—trumps government dependency. [Automatically generated summary]
The voters of New Hampshire have spoken, and what they've said is This childlike gibberish translated into a victory on the Democratic side for McKilzadek Google Eyes, a 1,400-year-old time traveler from the 1930s, who stepped from his magic police callbox and promised to make America a second-rate power again by imitating the economic structure of a dying culture being overrun by Islamic invaders.
On the Republican side, the incomprehensible electorate punked for New York businessman Fascisto Disgustamon, whose qualifications include a vocabulary of one-syllable words that everyone can understand, even when they make no sense.
In his victory speech, Fascisto thanked his family, his agent, his co-stars, his producers, and the scientists who created him out of the body parts of hanged criminals.
The results of the primary indicate that New Hampshireites followed the theme of their traditional state slogan, live free or die, and chose B. Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Nice country while it lasted, guys.
It was a nice country while it lasted.
Trump and Bernie win the New Hampshire primary.
And listen, you cannot blame, you cannot blame the voters.
It's the heroin.
There's a big problem in New Hampshire with drugs, and drugs are like that.
You feel great, and then you wake up and it's like, I voted for Bernie.
I'm so sorry.
I voted.
Ah, well, listen, nobody guaranteed that you were going to live in a free and prosperous country.
That doesn't come with life, you know.
In all seriousness, or some seriousness, I think something really important happened last night.
I really do.
I think it was a game-changing primary.
And so far, in the, I haven't, you know, I come in pretty early, so I didn't have a chance to listen to the commentary this morning.
But in the commentary I was listening to last night, I thought the media was not seeing it, was absolutely in denial about what had happened.
So we're going to talk about that.
We're going to get to what was really important.
But first, let's go to the electorate.
Let's talk to some of the voters.
We have a voter who voted for Bernie Sanders last night, and let's ask him why.
Why did you vote for Bernie Sanders?
He came and stood below my window in the moonlight.
And he promised me things.
Aha.
And what exactly did he promise you?
Rats.
Rats.
Fowlers.
Why Bernie Sanders Offered Hope00:14:32
Millions of them.
All red blood.
All these will I give you if you will obey me.
Sign me up.
I am on board.
See, you know, and you thought the electorate was foolish.
They're not.
They're just completely out of their minds.
All right, let's listen to Bernie Sanders' actual victory speech.
Now, what the American people understand is that our great country was based on a simple principle, and that principle is fairness.
Let me be very clear.
It is not fair when we have more income and wealth inequality today than almost any major country on earth, and when the top one-tenth of one percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%.
That's not fair.
It is not fair when the 20 wealthiest people in this country now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people.
So are you guys ready for a radical idea?
Together, we are going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.
So let's just start with a couple of things.
One is everything he just said.
I mean, what he said was untrue.
America was not founded on the principle that everything was going to be fair.
It was founded on a completely different principle that everyone was going to be free.
And you can't have both freedom and fairness because if people are free, some people are going to rise.
They're going to be better than other people.
They're going to have more talent, more skill.
They're going to work harder.
They're going to be better looking.
They're going to have richer parents.
They're going to have good luck.
It's not fair.
It's just not going to be fair.
And so there was never, ever any idea that America was going to be a fair place.
Everybody knows that when you're free, things get unequal.
You cannot be both free and equal.
If you want to be equal, you can't be free.
If you want to be free, you can't be equal.
This country was based on the notion of freedom, equality only before the law and in the eyes of God.
And that's a very, very different thing.
So that's completely ridiculous.
All that anger is just completely misplaced.
Secondly, all the left, we talked about this yesterday, I won't go into it forever, but all the left ever does is they want to take down the people on the top.
They never want to improve the people on the bottom.
They just say, if I give you his money, you will now be one of the people on the top, which of course never works because the people on the top are at the top for a reason.
Some of them have to do with luck and birth, but a lot of it has to do with work and intelligence and education.
So the left always conceives of money as a zero-sum game.
But as we talked about yesterday, money just is just a symbol for the desires of people, just a symbol for what people want.
And people can always want more stuff.
Invent an iPhone, the perfect example of capitalism at work, invent an iPhone, and more people will want things they didn't know they wanted before, and there will be more money.
That's what creates more money.
More desire, more money.
More stuff, more money.
Just the way it works.
You know, it's just not, it's not a zero-sum game.
But what does this part mean?
I thought that the Democratic side of this equation was less important than the Republican side.
I'm going to get to the Republican side later, but just to take a look at the Democratic side, I think really what this shows, a lot of it shows Hillary Clinton's weakness as a candidate.
And she's going to get less weak as she goes on into the southern states where more black people who traditionally vote for people like Hillary, the machine politician rather than the insurgent, they might go for Sanders.
I mean, Sanders is meeting with Al Sharpton and he's trying to reach out into that community.
So right this minute, all we know is that she's a weak candidate.
She panicked.
She brought out these screeching old lady feminists to yell at people and that's not going to work.
These young people don't trust her.
They don't like her.
She lost in every category except people over 65.
She's a dead letter and Sanders, all he did was expose her weakness.
Now, that could have really big implications as we go forward because one, it may mean that the party deserts.
The party may just think this is a bad bet.
We're going to go with somebody else.
We're going to go with Biden or something like this.
And two, as we've talked about before, it may bring Bloomberg into the picture or some other independent who just says, you know, she can be done.
She can be taken.
Right this minute, it doesn't look like Bernie Sanders is going to have legs, but he might.
And so we just don't know.
It's not that big a deal what happened.
The other thing that is important is what we'll call the Obama effect, is that the Democrats in New Hampshire identified as progressives in much larger numbers than they did the last presidential election.
Then it was like 56%, now it was 70%.
So during the Obama administration, people have moved to the left.
And I think we should understand what the word progressive means.
Let's bring in, we've brought in a brilliant professor to explain what the word progressive means.
Let's start with the word progressive.
Progressive is a term used to refer to things like cancer or emphysema or leftism or indeed anything that slowly destroys whatever it touches.
In political history, the term progressive replaced the term liberal when people realized liberalism didn't work.
Liberal had replaced the term leftist when leftism didn't work.
And leftist had replaced the term socialist when socialism didn't work.
Socialist, of course, had replaced the term progressive.
So the thing is, people are worried about the economy.
And Trump talked about this last night, and we'll get to that.
People are really worried about the economy.
And they don't seem to realize that it's an Obama economy.
This is an Obama economy.
All the inequality has gotten worse under Obama.
All the stagnation is worse under Obama.
The slow recovery from the absolute collapse of the economy, which was not Obama's fault, but it was the left's fault.
It was the government's fault, as well as Wall Street taking advantage of what the government was doing, but it was really the source was in the bad loans that the government insisted banks make.
That all this economy, all they want to do is double down on the things that have gotten them into this mess in the first place.
And it's an old game.
It's a ratchet.
The government makes things worse and then comes to you and says, you have to give us more power so we can make things better.
Things get worse.
Give us more power so they can make things better.
It goes on forever.
And one last point, but I just have to, I have to bring this up.
Bernie Sanders is always saying, we're the only country in the world, the only civilized country that doesn't have health care and doesn't have free college and doesn't have free this and free that.
He's talking about Europe.
He always talks about Sweden.
He talks about Germany.
These places are dying, okay?
Here's an article I found on the population rate in Europe.
Demographers have a name for when a population has more deaths than births, natural decrease.
It's rarely discussed because it's unusual in the modern era.
But that's about to change as natural decrease is becoming increasingly common across Europe and in many parts of the United States.
In Europe today, there is virtually no overall population growth from natural increase.
17 European countries except Kosovo, all of them except Kosovo, are experiencing natural decrease.
This means more people are dying than are being born.
More people are dying than are being born.
Russia, Germany, Italy, all these places.
You know, someone once said that no nation can survive the death of its God.
No nation can survive the death of its gods, I believe was the original quote.
And socialism is the death of God.
The churches in Europe are empty.
The government takes care of you.
You are the servant of the government.
You pray to the government.
You worship the government.
In Britain, I know that the national health care is called the national religion.
These places are dying.
They are disappearing in front of our eyes.
The Muslims who are coming in are just replacing the people there, just replacing the philosophy, and they're bringing God.
They're powerful because they have a God.
And that's what's happening, and that's Bernie Sanders.
That is what Bernie Sanders is offering.
And let me just add one more thing about the left.
Hillary, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary are hard-hitting this campaign finance reform, and so is Donald Trump.
This is one thing they all three of them agree on.
And Hillary made this thing that they hate is Citizens United.
And I always hate when the Supreme Court decisions get reduced to that, and nobody talks about, everybody knows what Roe v. Wade is, but people talk about Kilo and talk about Citizens United, and nobody remembers what the actual decision is.
They just become demonized or sanctified, one or the other.
So let's listen to Hillary for a minute, because she reminded people in her speech last night, in her concession speech, she reminded people of what Citizens United is.
In this campaign, you've heard a lot about Washington and about Wall Street.
Now, Senator Sanders and I both want to get secret, unaccountable money out of politics.
And let's remember, let's remember, Citizens United, one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our country's history was actually a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign.
A right-wing organization took aim at me and ended up damaging our entire democracy.
So yes, you're not going to find anybody more committed to aggressive campaign finance reform than me.
Let me just remind you, that is absolutely true, what she just said.
David Bossey, he's a chum of mine.
I bump into him from time to time.
David Bossey had a company called Citizens United.
He makes documentary.
Bossey makes documentaries.
He made a documentary about Hillary Clinton, about how dishonest she is and all this.
And she was running, this is 2010, I think, was the decision.
He tried to get this aired on television while the Hillary Clinton campaign was going on.
And it was banned.
He was not allowed because he has a corporation, because David has a corporation, Citizens United, he was banned from spending money to advertise or to buy time to show his documentary.
Okay, so he wasn't allowed to show his documentary and he wasn't allowed to advertise it because the McCain-Feingold law, which you will remember W. Bush let pass into law because he was so sure the Supreme Court was going to overturn it.
The McCain-Feingold law said a corporation 60 days before an election cannot spend that kind of money.
And the Supreme Court said, well, wait a minute.
You know, a corporation essentially has the same rights as a human being.
And they struck down, they gutted McCain-Feingold by striking down that law.
They said, of course you can air an attack ad on Hillary during an election.
Why shouldn't David be able to attack Hillary during an election?
That's absurd.
That is the very purpose of the First Amendment, free speech, free political speech, the very purpose of the First Amendment.
And this is when the left starts screaming, oh, but corporations aren't people.
Remember that with Mitt Romney?
Corporations aren't people.
Corporations aren't people to the left as long as the corporation happens to be speaking its mind.
When they want the corporation to stop polluting, when they want the corporation to pay taxes, when they want the corporation not to leave America, they suddenly say, oh, the corporation isn't being patriotic.
Oh, the corporation isn't being a good citizen.
Oh, be a good citizen corporation.
Suddenly, the corporation is a person.
Of course, a corporation is a person.
A corporation is just people who get together to form a unit.
That's all it is.
And when they talk about campaign finance reform, this is true of Donald Trump as well.
They're talking about one thing they're talking about, taking away your First Amendment right to political speech.
More money has come to the Democrat Party through Citizens United decision than through the Republican Party.
But that doesn't matter.
All they want is the right to shut you up.
They want the right to shut you up.
As she said, it started with a right-wing attack on her.
Why shouldn't there be right-wing attacks on her?
That's basically what the First Amendment says.
It says you shall have the right to make a right-wing attack on Hillary Clinton or a left-wing attack on anybody else or whatever you want.
And so Citizens United is a perfectly good decision that just gives too much power to the people.
And that's why they want to stop it.
And Trump is the same way.
All right.
Let's get to Trump, because I think this is really the big story of the night.
Let's listen first of all to Trump's acceptance speech.
And this, for those of you who can't see it, this actually is Donald Trump.
Green Acres is the place to be.
Farm living is the life for me.
Land's written out so far and wide.
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.
So much for New York values.
He wins one election in the country, one primary in the country, just throws New York under the bus.
It's terrible.
That was great.
I'm sure there's a million other videos like that that are going to be coming up as this guy goes forward because his past is quite checkered.
And I don't think people are going to care all that much, by the way.
So last night, after Trump won this tremendous, what basically happened was all his opponents are divided.
You know, the Cruz and Rubio and Bush and Christie, they all take the votes away from each other, and they leave Trump with this massive, this massive majority.
And all I heard last night were people saying, oh, this could be a brokered convention.
This is going to be a long slog.
This is going to be, you know, I don't think that's what we learned yesterday.
I think what we learned, and I include myself in this because I was in denial as well.
I think everybody's in denial.
I think what we learned is that Trump could win.
Trump, right this minute, if nothing changes, if nothing changes, and things always change, so I'm not making a prediction, but right this minute, just connecting the dots, Trump's the win.
I think Trump's the nominee right this minute.
Now, the things that could happen, it would be amazing if some of these candidates started to think, like, you know, better that Trump be stopped than that I get the nomination.
I mean, Jeb Bush, Jeb Exclamation Point Bush, you know, the guy got 11% of the vote last night.
He spent a fortune.
Trump's Winning Potential00:13:14
This is the other thing about Trump.
Trump did not spend a lot of time in New Hampshire.
This was a celebrity campaign.
This was the campaign that cost him the election in Iowa, that cost him the caucuses in Iowa because he didn't show up.
And in Iowa, you have to show up because caucuses take a lot of trouble.
This was, people will show up for Trump.
And they'll show up for Trump whether he comes to their house or not.
They'll show up for Trump when he goes on TV.
They'll show up for Trump when he uses four-letter words, when he calls on you to beat up hecklers in the stand.
They will show up for him.
I don't think this is unique to New Hampshire.
Right this minute, I think he has a good shot at the nomination.
And things may change again.
Chris Christie looks like he might drop out.
You know, somebody might finally slap Jeb Bush in the face and say, Jeb, even if you won the nomination, you'd lose the election.
So get out.
I mean, in a race between Rubio, Cruz, and Trump, I think things would really change.
When I saw Rubio blow that debate the other night, I thought, you know, he may have just blown everything.
He may have just handed everything to Trump.
Things are going to have to change.
They don't attack Trump.
I don't know why they don't attack Trump.
Maybe because he's such a mad dog.
But Cruz understands this.
Cruz has a new ad coming out attacking Trump with a Trump doll that's very funny.
You know, I think that they're going to have to turn on him and fight it out.
And they're going to have to figure out a way to fight with a junkyard dog because that's what he is.
This is now a, they talk about a snowball's chance in hell.
Trump is now a snowball in hell.
He is rolling downhill.
He will gather steam as people think he can win.
People have tried exposing his past, exposing his philosophies.
It hasn't worked.
I think right this minute, the big story is this is a viable candidate.
So what is he saying?
Let's stop talking about the four-letter words and let's stop talking about the vulgarity and the past.
Let's hear what he said last night.
Let's listen.
Well, let's listen to just that first cut of his victory speech.
So look, in a nutshell, we're going to make great trade deals.
We're going to rebuild our military.
It's going to be so big, so strong, so powerful.
Nobody, nobody is going to mess with us.
Believe me, nobody.
Nobody.
Now, this is a guy who has said that we spend too much on the military and that he would cut the military, but he's going to cut it and make it better.
I mean, people always say that, but he's going to cut it because he can make the deals.
It's going to, you know, he never gets specific.
He never gets specific.
Let's play cut number two.
I want to hear this whole thing.
I don't want to just pick him apart.
I want to hear what he's saying to people.
We're going to be tough.
We're going to be big.
We're going to be strong.
Nobody's going to mess with us ever.
Okay, let's hear it.
We're going to have strong, incredible borders, and people are going to come into our country, but they're going to come into our country legally.
They're going to come in legally.
We're going to build a wall.
It's going to be built.
It's not even, believe it or not, it's not even a difficult thing to do.
You know, it's funny.
All of the Republican candidates, except for Jeb exclamation point, are basically saying the same thing.
We're going to keep these guys out.
You know, we're going to build a wall.
We're going to do something.
We're going to increase it.
And everybody says, well, yes, but the point is, what about the 12 million, which is now the running number?
The 12 million illegals are already here.
Rubio says ultimately they should have a path to citizenship, but not for at least 10 years.
10 years will give them legal status, some kind of legal status, but then maybe a path to citizenship.
Trump says they're all going to have to go back and then come back in illegally.
Now, I don't know if that means they just like jump across the border and jump back in.
I'm not sure what that means, but it's implausible.
Let's put it that way.
It's not plausible.
But, you know, we're going to have a wall.
It's going to be a great wall.
We're going to have a great military.
It's going to be a great military.
No one will mess with us.
Big wall.
All right, play number three.
We're going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
It is a total disaster.
We're repealing and replacing Obamacare.
It's gone.
We're getting rid of Common Core.
We're going to educate our children locally.
We educate our children locally.
We are going to preserve our very sacred Second Amendment.
There's not going to be any more chipping away at our Second Amendment.
If we had protection in California recently and so many other places, you could even look to Paris.
Paris has the toughest gun laws in the world.
France has the toughest gun laws in the world.
These animals go in.
They start shooting one, two, three, 130 people with many people horribly wounded, horribly wounded right now in the hospital.
If there were bullets going in the other direction, believe me, it would have been a whole different story, folks.
But nobody had protection.
Okay, so that was three points.
I love the way he just riffs, you know, and he riffs and he just hits buttons.
He hits buttons.
You know, we're going to have guns.
We're going to get rid of Common Core and we're going to repeal Obamacare.
Three big buttons, right?
Because everybody hates Obamacare.
First of all, he doesn't mention that what he's in favor of is government health care.
He has said this repeatedly.
He's still saying it.
He's never taken it back.
He believes that we should have single-payer government health care.
So right now we have fascist health care.
Obamacare is a fascist program.
And what I mean by fascist is under fascism, companies are still private, but the government tells them what to do.
When you can tell an insurer that he has to insure somebody who's already sick, that's not insurance anymore.
That's not a business model.
Insurance is a bet.
It's a bet that you make with the insurer that you are going to need that money.
You know, you're essentially betting against yourself.
You're betting you'll get sick.
You know, you're betting you'll get sick.
And the insurer is saying, now, you look pretty healthy.
You're a young guy.
I'll take that bet, you know.
And so he gets a lot of money.
A lot of money piles up.
And out of the 10 people he insured, one of them gets sick and he uses a little portion of that money.
Once you say, oh, by the way, I've got four weeks to live and I'm going to need all kinds of crazy health care and it's going to cost you a fortune, but you still have to sign me up.
That's not a business model anymore.
That doesn't exist.
And so when Obama was making these speeches, the left is really good at creating phrases that make things sound like what they're not.
So they would say, pre-existing conditions.
What kind of evil, what kind of evil insurance company wouldn't insure you just because you have a pre-existing condition?
Any insurance company, any capitalist free market insurance company won't insure you if you're already sick.
It's a bad bet.
You're going to saying, you know, like, it's like saying, yeah, I wrecked my car.
Could you give me insurance for my car?
Would you insure?
I mean, that's not a business model.
So that's fascism.
That's Obamacare telling companies what they have to do.
And they signed on to it because what Obama said was, I'm going to force everybody to buy insurance.
So it's like, that is fascism.
That's basically the company saying, oh, well, good.
You're going to force me to have a million more clients.
Fantastic.
And so, sure, I'll insure them.
Whatever.
And also, you're going to back me up.
You're going to give me subsidies if I can't afford it.
It's going to be great.
So all Trump is saying is we're going to go from fascism to socialism.
That's all he's saying there.
But the way he says it, the way he says it makes it sound like he's hitting every button.
No more Obamacare guns.
We're going to have guns.
There are going to be bullets flying in the other direction.
Listen, I agree with that.
I agree with what he said about guns.
It's absolutely true that if the populace is armed, then you don't have terrorists and you don't have bad government coming to get you quite so easily as you do in European countries.
So he's absolutely right about that.
But just listen to the way he mingles truth and deception.
Anyway, let's go back.
Let's hear the last one.
I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.
Remember that.
Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5% unemployment.
The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35.
In fact, I even heard recently 42%.
Do you think we'd have gatherings like this if we had 5% unemployment?
Do you really think we'd have these gatherings?
Forgetting about security, forgetting about ISIS, which, by the way, we're going to knock the hell out of ISIS.
We're going to knock the hell out of them.
I wonder if people who vote for Trump have no children, you know, because this is what little boys sound like.
They say, I'm going to be the greatest.
I'm going to do this.
And then I'm going to knock you down.
It's like about five years old.
That's what little boys, they run.
I'm going to fly.
I'm going to throw myself off the roof.
I'm going to fly.
All right.
But again, a lot of truth in there.
He said if there were 5% unemployment, do you think anybody would be voting for Donald Trump?
No.
I mean, if there were 5% unemployment, the next Democrat would be walking in there on water, basically.
I mean, you wouldn't be able to get Democrats out of the White House for the next 30 years if there were 5% unemployment.
He's right.
The real numbers are around 20, 25%.
And the people who have jobs have worse jobs than they had before.
So he's absolutely right.
He's absolutely right.
Trump now has a chance to win.
And if he wins, it means there is a major, major realignment of the Republican Party.
It means, I believe, that if conservatism isn't dead as a philosophy, if small government constitutional conservatism, the kind of thing that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, I think, are talking about, that is now third-party stuff.
Because what he is selling, what you just heard, it's nationalism.
It's nationalism.
We're going to be so strong.
We're going to be so great.
We're going to be so good.
And it's all about him.
I'm going to do it.
Whenever somebody says, how are you going to do it?
I'll do it.
I'll do it.
I'm a businessman.
I do it.
I'll do it.
I do.
You look, me, I will be, I will be great.
And it's like, and if you are nasty to me, I will be nasty to you.
If you're nice to me, I like you, even if you're Putin.
It doesn't matter.
You're a murderer.
You said something nice about me.
I love you.
It's all about him.
And so what we're talking about is this powerful, powerful executive office.
Once again, it's an Obama effect.
This powerful executive office where people look to a human being to do for them what the system and the laws no longer will do, which is make them rich, make them strong, make them independent.
Stop telling me what to do.
But it's not about conservatism.
What, you know, I want the country to be strong and rich too.
I want the country to be, I want everybody to have a job.
I want business to be ramping up again.
I want our military solidified and brought back to good health so we can defend not just ourselves but our friends and our principles and our properties overseas, our interests overseas.
All that stuff, though all that stuff was, is the effect of liberty.
It's the effect of personal liberty, it's not the cause of personal liberty.
You will not be free under Donald Trump, any more than you are free under Barack Obama, under more, any more than you will be free under Hillary Clinton.
It's freedom that brings you the success you know.
In the Bible it says, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these other things will be given unto you.
The same is true in government.
Seek ye liberty first, liberty first, and you will get all those other things.
But it's hard because it means putting up with people you don't like.
It means people are going to get richer than you and more successful than you.
It means that you know people are going to say things that you hate and there may not be a trigger warning.
You know it may just come right out of the blue.
He may be shot right through the heart by an opinion you disagree with.
All these things are very, very difficult and nobody who won last night is offering them to you, these things that make people free and make you rich and make you powerful.
It's all about liberty.
It's all about the liberty.
It's always been about the liberty.
Nobody who won in New Hampshire last night was offering that you live free.
You know that's their slogan, live free or die.
They chose die and so we'll go on.
And I just think you know, right this minute, as things stand, Trump is a very very, very serious candidate.
All all the talk that his people wouldn't show up, all the talk that celebrity candidacy wouldn't work, all of that are not hearing what these people want, are not hearing what these people are saying and what they want.
And to the Republican establishment, I have to say, the message today is, we hate you, you failed, you lied, we hate you.
That's the message, and you can either shut that message down and try to pour money into like shutting it down, or you can hear it, you can listen to it and start to change and start to bring people back to a structured, intelligent conservatism that is not dependent on an individual but is instead dependent on the constitution and that might look a lot like Ted Cruise, who you also hate because he's that guy.
He's that guy.
So a bad night in New Hampshire.
Bad New Hampshire.
Bad New Hampshire.
Shakespeare's Queer Love Stories00:06:25
Valentine's time, oh, first of all, a blessed ash wednesday.
To Christians who celebrate ash wednesday, this is the beginning of lent, when Christians, you know they put ash on their head and they take on a somber demeanor To mark the fact that no, Amsterdam voted for Donald Trump.
Oh no, that's not what it's about.
It's about, it's the beginning of Lent that is 40 days of fasting plus Sundays to mark Jesus' fast in the desert that he went into after his baptism.
And then after that comes Holy Week, when we mark Jesus' procession into Jerusalem and his crucifixion, and finally Easter comes when he rises again.
And as the old joke goes, if he sees his shadow, there are six more weeks of winter.
Which is, but anyway, it is a blessed day for many Christians, and I wish you a good Lent, as it were.
Valentine's stuff I like, and this is the last Valentine's stuff I like.
And I have to tell you, this has been really hard.
It is really, really hard to come up with good love stories.
Most love stories are so sentimental and silly and untrue.
If I had to list my favorite movies, and I won't because I want to save them for stuff I like, almost all of them would be crime, suspense, and adventure movies.
Just a lot of them would be crime.
That's the stuff I like.
That's not saying that those are the best movies I've ever seen, but those are my favorite movies and the movies that I watch again, which I don't do that often.
If I listed 20 of my favorite movies, only one of them would be a pure love story.
And so I have to mention it, even though many of you may have already seen it, and that is the movie Shakespeare in Love, which I think is one of the truly wonderful pictures.
It has so much stuff I like in it.
Gwyneth Paltrow has never been more beautiful.
One of the things I like about Gwyneth Paltrow is when you hear her speak, you know, without a script, she's an idiot, you know, and I really like when beautiful women are stupid because it makes me imagine that I have a chance with them.
You know, if a beautiful woman is intelligent and has self-respect, I know I'm going to strike out.
But if she's dumb, you might get there.
So anyway, Gwyneth Paltrow, never been more beautiful.
It is written, it has two screenwriters listed, Mark Norman and Tom Stoppard, but Mark Norman has never done anything good.
Tom Stoppard may be my favorite living writer.
Tom Stoppard is a playwright, British playwright, who wrote Arcadia, one of only two plays that I ever gave a standing ovation to, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead, just a brilliant, brilliant intellectual playwright.
And became a pariah in England when he supported Margaret Thatcher.
And so as the two greatest playwrights now walking the earth, in English anyway, the two greatest English-speaking playwrights, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet, are both conservatives.
And he's just a brilliant writer, and I feel really confident that he wrote a lot of this script.
It's a brilliant piece about art.
It's a brilliant piece about love.
And it's a brilliant piece about gender roles because it uses the Shakespeare trope of people dressing up in different roles.
And by the way, you know, when I was a kid and I was learning about Shakespeare, they would always say, they would talk about these gender switches in Shakespeare as if they kind of confirmed Freud, that there was some kind of homosexual element to people falling in love with a guy dressed up as a girl and a girl dressed up as a guy.
But it's not true.
Really, what Shakespeare confirms is in the case of men falling in love, that they can see a woman through her disguise.
That's really what it says.
It says that a womanliness is a soul thing.
And even if you dress up as a man, you're still a woman.
Ben Shapiro almost got beaten up for saying that, but that's really, really true.
The only thing Shakespeare will do is he will let a woman fall in love with a woman dressed up as a man, which is kind of interesting comment on the difference between the two sexes.
Let's look at this one moment.
This is when Gwyneth Paltrow is this young lady who is so enamored of the theater and has discovered this young playwright who's considered sort of the second or third best playwright in England.
And it's William Shakespeare.
And so she has dressed up as a man so she can be in the theater.
She loves the theater.
She's called before Queen Victoria, the great Judy Dench, who I think this is actually the role where she became famous in America.
Because I used to, when I lived in England, I would come back to America and tell everybody about her, and nobody had heard of her.
But then they made this movie, and I think she won the Oscar for this.
I'm not quite sure if this is the one.
But anyway, I think this is the one that brought her to America.
So here she is presented to the Queen.
She is being forced, Gwyneth is being forced to marry a man she doesn't love.
She's falling in love with Shakespeare, and the Queen brings her.
She's presented to the Queen Elizabeth.
I've seen you.
You are the one who comes to all the plays at Whitehall, at Richmond.
Your Majesty.
What do you love so much?
Your Majesty.
Speak up, girl.
I know who I am.
Do you love stories of kings and queens?
Of feats of arms?
Or is it courtly love?
I love theater.
To have stories acted for me by a company of fellows isn't.
They're not acted for you, they are acted for me.
And?
And I love poetry above all.
Above Lord Wessex.
My lord, when you cannot find your wife, you better look for her at the playhouse.
Playwrights teach us nothing about love.
They make it pretty, they make it comical, or they make it lust.
They cannot make it true.
Oh, but they can.
I mean, Your Majesty, they do not.
They have not, but I believe there is one who can.
There is one who can.
It's Billy Big Boy, as they call him in Hollywood.
Billy Big Boy, William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare in Love, a terrific movie.
Every line of dialogue is true.
Every scene is right.
Great cast.
And Ben Affleck in the one part where he is absolutely superb.
He's actually a good actor, but he's great in this because he plays a loudmouth blowhard.