Andrew Clavin frames Justice Scalia’s death as a pivotal moment, not a tragedy, celebrating his originalist legacy in Citizens United, Heller, and Hobby Lobby—cases he argues protect free speech, guns, and religious liberty. He warns Obama’s nominee (like Kagan) would replace Scalia’s textualism with judicial activism, citing her diet-regulation remarks as proof of overreach. Clavin contrasts Ted Cruz’s defiance of Obama’s pick with Mitch McConnell’s cautious approach, predicting leftist fury from media and Hollywood. The episode ties Scalia’s absence to a broader erosion of America’s egalitarian creed, urging conservatives to unite against progressive policies that prioritize identity over individual rights—while dismissing GOP infighting as a threat to 2016’s outcome. [Automatically generated summary]
Various conservative pundits have been discussing the American political landscape after the sudden death of Antonin Scalia, one of the greatest thinkers ever to sit on the Supreme Court.
In light of the precarious philosophical balance of the court, let's examine 10 of the possible implications of Scalia's death.
One, we're doomed.
Two, there is no God.
Three, there is a God, but he hates us, and so, four, we're doomed.
Five, the fate of the nation now depends on the courage, integrity, and moral fiber of the Republicans in the Senate.
And so, of course, six, we're doomed.
Seven, Republican scientists are working round the clock on a new kind of Viagra that works on men's backbones and would thus give Senator, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell the stiff spine he'll need to stand up to the enormous pressure that will be exerted on him by the news media and other corrupt left-wing interest groups so that he can veto any radical left-wing, gay slash black slash female slash knucklehead that Obama tries to stuff on the court.
Eight, and just kidding about the Viagra, we're doomed.
Nine, even if Obama behaves with his usual sneering disregard for the People's Congress, and even if McConnell does his usual spineless surrender to pressure, the nation may yet be saved by a populace deeply invested in the American tradition of liberty, independence, and constitutional law.
10.
Yeah, doomed.
Doomed-de-de-doomed-doom-doomed.
Doomed-de-doomed.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
So anything happened while I was away, boys?
And I turn my back on you people for 10 minutes and you lose the Supreme Court.
What the hell?
This election is now beginning to seem like one of those, it's like it's scripted by one of those novelists from like the 60s, like Fletcher Nebel or Alan Drury.
They used to write these kind of Washington, D.C. thrillers, you know, in which the worst possible thing was about to happen, but it was going to happen through legal means, not through like, you know, guys parachuting in or, you know, gunplay or anything.
It was going to happen just through legal means, something awful would happen, like Donald Trump was going to be elected president.
You would read this thing on the edge of your seat going, oh, Donald Trump might be elected president, you know.
And now it's like, yeah, I'll vote for him.
I would vote.
I think those guys would just be out of business if they were working today.
All right, so let's assess.
Let's assess what has happened.
I mean, this is a huge deal.
But the first thing we should just say about this is this is not a tragedy, okay?
You can't say that the death of Antonin Scalia, sudden as it was, is a tragedy.
This is a 79-year-old man who had an amazing life, who rose to the highest station of a man in his profession can rise to, who did good in that profession, who showed himself to be a man of integrity, who helped his country.
He had, I don't know, nine children, 30 grandchildren, I mean hundreds of children and grandchildren.
He had a happy marriage.
That's not a tragedy.
That's a victory.
That's like, well done, thou good, faithful servant.
And now it's up to us.
And that's why it's kind of strange that I have to say I felt this when I heard about it, I felt it like a blow.
I mean, I was, my wife and I sort of celebrated Valentine's Day on Saturday, and we were hiking, and we were sitting at lunch, and I heard about this.
It came over my cell phone, which I should know to turn off at this point.
And I just remember it was, I had the same thought that went through my mind when I heard that Andrew Breitbart had died.
And I'm not comparing Breitbart to Scalia.
He would hate that.
He would hate for me to say that they were in the same kind of category.
But still, when I heard that Scalia had died, and when I heard that Breitbart died, my first thought was, oh no, maybe God isn't on our side.
You know, you just think like maybe pieces are being pulled off the board that we really need in order to win the game.
So let's look at what's at stake.
Remember, Citizens United, right?
Freedom of speech and freedom of political speech.
You wouldn't be able to attack Hillary Clinton if he didn't feel like letting you if Citizens United is overturned as both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton would like to have it done.
DC versus Heller, which protected your Second Amendment gun rights, Hobby Lobby, which protected your right to live out the meaning of your religious creed, despite what elites happen to think is the deeper morality that they've come up with in their parlors and living rooms that contradicts the wisdom of the ages.
Hobby Lobby, all those would have been decided a different way.
You know, Scalia was often called a strict constructionist, but that wasn't true, and he said it wasn't true.
He said that a strict constructionist would say that when the Constitution guarantees you freedom of speech and of the press, that would allow you to censor, for instance, a handwritten letter, because it's not made by a press and it's not speech.
But of course, that would be strict constructionism.
Really, the writers of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were using synecdoche.
They were using speech in the press to mean expression, all expression.
So he was saying, no, you do have to interpret the Constitution.
But he was an originalist, which meant that you had to interpret the Constitution according to what the guys writing it meant, not what you thought it meant.
So here's a cut of him at a debate with one of the, I think Breyer, one of the liberal Supreme Court justices, explaining why that's a good idea, to interpret the words as the men who wrote them meant them.
I'm not pretending that doing it by text and the original meaning of that text is perfect, that it's going to solve every problem.
But it solves an awful lot of problems, especially the most controversial ones.
It doesn't take a whole lot of history to figure out that nobody thought that the Bill of Rights stopped a state from prohibiting abortion.
Nobody thought that the Bill of Rights prohibited a state from criminalizing sodomy.
Nobody thought that the Bill of Rights prohibited states from prohibiting assisted suicide.
So many of the most controversial questions, it's a piece of cake to decide it.
And it is not my burden to prove that originalism and this historical approach, what did the people do, what did they decide, it's not my burden to prove that it's perfect.
It's just my burden to prove it's better than anything else.
And the anything else is the other approach.
It's up to the judges what equal protection should mean today, what due process should mean today.
This is an immense amount of power.
See, his point is not that each decision is right or wrong.
This is the thing that leftists and the media, but I repeat myself, continually get wrong.
It's not a question of what is right or wrong.
It's a question of who decides what's right and wrong.
And what he wanted was for the people to decide, because the Constitution clearly didn't say that you couldn't pass a law against abortion.
So it was for the people to decide.
You had to go out and convince your fellow citizens.
He actually wanted the government.
See, he was pointing out that lawyers don't know anything about right and wrong.
They don't go to school to learn about right and wrong.
They're not ethicists.
They're not priests.
They don't know anything more about right and wrong than the ordinary Joe walking down the street.
That's not what they know.
What they know is how to interpret the law, how to say, oh, these words in precedent and in history mean this.
And that was what he felt their job was, not to rewrite the law according to what felt good at the time.
He wasn't saying, oh, you know, don't allow abortions.
He didn't, you know, he may have thought that, he may have felt that, but he was just saying the Constitution doesn't prohibit you from doing it.
He wanted less power.
You know, today is Washington's birthday, and we should remember that the last time that we had a man in government who wanted less power was probably George Washington.
And, you know, Washington, it's not something that comes along very often.
George Washington believed in a powerful executive.
He was not a guy who thought that the president shouldn't have a lot of power.
He believed the president should have a lot of power.
But think of what he could have had.
I mean, George Washington came to the end of a war at the head of an army with a country just being formed.
99.9% of the people in that position would have taken the country over.
They would have become king.
Instead, he went to the Capitol, he delivered his sword into the hand of the civilian government, and went back to Mount Vernon.
And that's why the King of England said, this must be one of the greatest men ever born.
Well, Scalia was in that tradition.
He was on the Supreme Court to make sure that the Supreme Court didn't have supreme power, but that that power belonged to you.
Let's compare that just for a minute to one of Obama's classic Supreme Court pics, Elena Kagan.
Here is a cut from Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing.
Senator Tom Coburn is questioning her.
Just listen to this.
Let's compare.
If I wanted to sponsor a bill and it said, Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day.
And I got it through Congress, and it's now the law of the land.
Got to do it.
Does that violate the Commerce Clause?
Sounds like a dumb law.
Yeah, I got one that's real similar to it.
I think it's equally dumb.
I'm not going to mention which it is.
But I think that the question of whether it's a dumb law is different from whether the question of whether it's constitutional.
And I think that courts would be wrong to strike down laws that they think are senseless just because they're senseless.
Well, I guess the question I'm asking is, do we have the power to tell people what they have to eat every day?
Senator Coburn.
No, I'm not cutting that off because he never answers the question.
It really does end.
Senator Coburn, does the government have the power?
It's a very, very simple question.
Does the Constitution prevent the government from telling us what to eat every day?
It's really a yes or no.
I mean, that is a classic yes or no question.
That's who Obama is going to appoint if he's allowed to appoint.
That's the kind of person.
And let me just take a slight detour here to mention another, one of my favorite Antonin and Scalia moments.
And it's a moment that actually does address what he was talking about before.
He did an interview in New York Magazine with a kind of clueless elite named Jennifer Sr.
And the reason I know that she's a clueless elite was because after this, I think she was sent to the New York Times and became a correspondent for them.
And at one point, he says to her, you know, I believe in the devil.
And she says, well, you know, and she's shocked.
You can read it on the page.
She's shocked.
And he says, you know, yeah, you don't see a lot of proof of the devil.
He says, it's curious.
In the Gospels, the devil is doing all sorts of things.
He's making pigs run off cliffs.
He's possessing people and whatnot.
And that doesn't happen very much anymore.
This is Scalia talking.
He says, it's because he's smart.
What he's doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God.
He's much more successful that way.
So she says, well, you're saying the devil is persuading people to not believe in God.
Couldn't there be other reasons to not believe?
And Scalia says, well, there certainly can be other reasons, but it certainly favors the devil's desires.
I mean, come on, that's the explanation for why there's not demonic possession all over the place.
That always puzzled me.
What happened to the devil?
You know, he used to be all over the place.
He used to be all over the New Testament.
What happened to him?
He got wilier.
And then she says, isn't it terribly frightening to believe in the devil as if she's talking to a child who just made this idea up, right?
And Scalia, one of the possibly the most brilliant men in the country, one of the most brilliant men in the country, says, you're looking at me as though I'm weird.
My God, are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the devil?
I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the devil.
It's in the gospels.
You travel in circles, he says to her.
You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the devil.
Most of mankind has believed in the devil for all of history.
Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the devil.
And what I love about this is like, first of all, he calls her out of her little bubble where she's so used to being that it doesn't even occur to her that she's there.
And what I love about this is if you go online and look for this, look for this, you know, just put in Scalia and Satan or whatever, you know, the comments by these kind of half-wit commentators, these sort of, you know, internet YouTube commentators, like, what an idiot.
What an idiot is.
You know, Scalia is an idiot.
Now, just think about this for a minute.
This is a guy from Harvard Law.
So we know, you know, we know he's not an idiot, right?
And a lot of people think he's one of the smartest.
So if you're calling Scalia stupid, there's probably a stupid person involved in that conversation, but it's probably not Etna Scalia.
What he's saying and what he's doing is he's taking you out.
That thing that you say, well, that's stupid.
That's, you know, when you say to a man that brilliant, that's stupid.
That's just an intellectual atmosphere.
That's the zeitgeist, which most of us think is common sense.
Most of us live in this atmosphere.
We breathe it in and we never question it.
All of us do this to some extent.
And what he was, you know, in the Bible, Jesus and John the Baptist always go around, they say metanoieté in the Greek, metanoite, and it's always translated as repent, repent.
You know, everybody thinks, oh, I have to repent.
It really, just as good a translation is think again.
Think again.
Metanoiete, think again.
And what they're saying is all of us are in this atmosphere of things that we absolutely know to be true that are wrong, that are wrong.
Think again.
And so what Scalia was saying before about the law is the intellectual assumptions that the elite judges are breathing are not the law.
That just perhaps the wisdom of the ages that was poured into the Constitution should keep you from imprinting the common sense, quote unquote, of the moment on the populace, should keep you from enforcing what you think is common sense on the populace.
And the Constitution should get you to think again that maybe there's a deeper truth or maybe the people should decide what is right or wrong.
All right, so here we are, right?
The balance of the court is at stake.
There's a GOP debate the night Scalia dies.
And who, of course, but, you know, Constitution superhero Senator Ted Cruz is the only guy who really delivered the telling blow, who really said what had to be said.
Balance of the Court At Stake00:03:30
So let's play him.
It underscores the stakes of this election.
We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that will strike down every restriction on abortion adopted by the states.
We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that will reverse the Heller decision, one of Justice Scalia's seminal decisions that upheld the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
We are one justice away from a Supreme Court that would undermine the religious liberty of millions of Americans.
And the stakes of this election for this year, for the Senate, the Senate needs to stand strong and say, we're not going to give up the U.S. Supreme Court for a generation by allowing Barack Obama to make one more liberal appointee.
And then State of South Carolina, one of the most important judgments for the men and women of South Carolina to make is who on this stage has the background, the principle, the character, the judgment, and the strength of resolve to nominate and confirm principled constitutionalists to the court.
And Cruz can honestly make the case that he's it.
I mean, he can make, you know, the more I think about Cruz, I have to say, I'm not sure Cruz can get elected.
The more I think about him, the more I think he would make a great president, not a good president.
I seriously think that Ted Cruz would make a great president.
Anyway, he gets it.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, comes out and he says, we're just going to not vote on any pick of Obama.
Obama's not going to be allowed to appoint the next member.
Well, okay.
All hell has already been unleashed and it's just the beginning.
All right.
Google Mitch McConnell today.
Google Mitch McConnell and just look in the news section.
There is not a nice word about Mitch McConnell on the whole page, on the whole page.
It's all, oh, Mitch McConnell's destroying the country.
Mitch McConnell, this is it.
I mean, the left is going to unleash hell and it's already started.
It's going to be the news media.
It's going to be entertainment.
There are going to be movies made with jokes about Mitch McConnell and television.
Saturday Night Level never rest.
I mean, every day, every day, it's going to be, you know, here's just a quick example from the New York Times.
Here's the New York Times.
I love it when the New York Times is time explaining to the Republicans, time-explaining to the Republicans, what a terrible mistake they're making by standing up for their principles.
So here's an op-ed today.
Senator is the lead.
Senator Mitch McConnell's strategy to maintain the Republican majority has been clear, trying to prove that his party can govern.
But by saying he will block a Supreme Court nominee who has not even been named, Mr. McConnell is headed toward partisan warfare instead.
Have you noticed how New York Times op-eds actually only make sense if you read them in the voice of your crazy ex-girlfriend?
It's like the entire op-ed page is written by the girl you luckily got away from and to be with the girl you're with now.
It's like that girl who just absolutely lost control over every little thing.
Senator Mitch McConnell's strategy.
Anyway, so let's stop here though for a minute and ask ourselves the really important question, the underlying important question.
It's the death of one man.
This is the death of one man.
A great man, no question about it.
79 years old, people die.
That's a good life.
Like I said, it's not a tragedy.
How did it get to be that the republic, this republic that has survived the death of George Washington, survived the death of Abraham Lincoln, survived the death of Martin Luther King, we're still here.
How is it that we're discussing whether or not this republic is going to survive the death of this one guy?
Death Of An Era00:09:16
And it really did.
When it first happened, I just thought like, uh-oh, you know, when you take a blow, your first thing, you know, after you've been hit, your first idea is, this is the worst thing ever.
You know, I mean, if anyone's ever been really hit, that's what you think.
But also, just even you take an emotional blow, you think this is the end.
So when I first heard this, I thought, oh my God, we're doomed.
I really did think we're doomed.
So the reason for this, though, there is a reason for this.
And Charles Murray wrote about it even before Scalia died.
He wrote this piece in the weekend Wall Street Journal called Trump's America.
And let me just read a little bit of it to you to explain why we're in this position.
Why is it Scalia has taken on this importance?
He says, if you are dismayed by Trumpism, don't kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nominee.
Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken.
It is the end game.
It is also the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half century, America's divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, Who Are We, two components of that national identity stand out.
One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions.
The other, this is the important point, the other is the very idea of America, something unique to us.
As the historian Richard Hofstetter once said, it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, not to have ideologies, but to be one.
What does this ideology consist of?
Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty, and individualism.
That is what it means to be an American.
Egalitarianism, liberty, and individualism.
From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified.
Equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
All right.
Then Murray, this is the guy who wrote Coming Apart.
So he has a lot of facts and figures about what's been happening to people over the last 40 years.
Then he goes into talk about how economic difficulties and feminism and black rights, which feminism and black rights, as he says, begin with the American creed.
They begin with all those things, those good things about America, but having succeeded, they then went past that into group identity rights, which Trump individual rights, and the kind of affirmative action things which Trump the idea of egalitarianism.
So he's now saying that support for the American Creed has shrunk.
And as support for the American Creed has shrunk, so has its correspondence to daily life.
Our vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that touch almost anything we want to do.
Individualism is routinely ignored in favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class.
Operationally, as well as ideologically, the American Creed is shattered.
So this is the thing.
See, a guy like Scalia can stick his finger in the dyke, okay?
He can stick his finger in the dike to keep the ramifications, the implications of America losing faith in egalitarianism and liberty and individualism from bursting through.
But ultimately, he's just a guy.
He's just one guy, and people die.
And people, let me tell you something, death is a really, really effective way of ending someone's effect on the country.
I noticed this when I was a little kid and Martin Luther King was shot.
And all those speeches people make, we'll carry on in his tradition.
We'll carry on his work.
You know, you got Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton Jr.
There was no carrying on his work.
Andrew Breitbart died, and now his site is just a Trump advertisement site.
You know, it's, well, I'm sorry, but it is, you know, and they have a right to support Trump, but that's not what Breitbart would be doing.
And I'm not speaking for him.
I don't know who he'd support, but he wouldn't let his site devolve into just that kind of partisanship, that kind of localized partisanship.
People die, and it ends what they do.
It ends them on this plane.
And so it becomes up to us.
When a guy like Scalia dies, what you should say is, well done, thou good and faithful servant.
We'll take it from here.
But if we're not there, if we've lost the path, if we're looking for someone not to do stuff for ourselves, but to have people do stuff for us, whether it's Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, you know, whether he's going to give us everything or he's going to make America great again.
It's like, don't worry, you don't have to do it.
I'm going to do it now.
It's all going to be me.
That's not American.
That's not American.
If we've lost that sense that we're supposed to do it, then a guy like Scalia cannot save us forever because he can't live forever.
And that's why this feels like such a dire moment.
So let's just for a minute just take a look, looking back at that CBS debate on Saturday.
Let's take a look at two of the other candidates, Trump and Jeb Exclamation Point, when they got into what is now a sort of celebrated back and forth fight.
The weakest person on the stage by far on illegal immigration is Jeb Bush.
They come out of an act of love.
Whether you like it or not, he is so weak on illegal immigration, it's laughable, and everybody knows it.
So, you know, this is the standard operating procedure to disparage me.
That's fine.
I don't want to.
Spend a little more money on the commercialists.
But if you want to talk about weakness, you want to talk about weakness.
It's weak to disparage women.
It's weak to disparage Hispanics.
It's weak to denigrate the disabled.
And it's really weak to call John McCain a loser because he was a patient.
I never called him.
No, I don't think that.
That is outrageous.
He's an American hero.
He also said about language.
I've laid out my plan.
He said about language, my language.
Two days ago, he said he would take his pants off and moon everybody.
And that's fine.
Nobody reports that.
He gets up and says that, and then he tells me, oh, my language was a little bit rough.
So that's an important conversation to be having, right?
Because for the record, Jeb Bush didn't say that.
He said to a reporter, I could moon everybody and nobody would pay any attention.
All right.
For those of us who think that Trump is a disaster for this country, Trump would be a disaster.
First of all, he'd lose in the general election, but that would be the best outcome.
I mean, you know how bad Trump is if it would be a better outcome that a Democrat would win, which would also be a disaster.
But Trump is just pure disaster straight down there.
And his remarks about Scalia have been shallow and stupid, and he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he has nowhere withal to pick the kind of replacement that a guy like Ted Cruz or even Marco Rubio, not to leave him out, would pick.
People thought that Jeb Bush came off as strong in this exchange.
The only thing important about this exchange is that it threatens to keep Jeb Exclamation Point in the race.
And that's a problem because as long as he feels that he's accomplishing something, fighting Trump, and as long as that makes him feel that he's defending the Bush family name or whatever he's doing, as long as that keeps him above in double digits in the primaries and in the polls, he's going to stay in.
And as long as he stays in, he's going to divide the vote and give Trump the chance, that shot at the nomination that Trump needs.
If Jeb Exclamation Point really knew what was going on and really cared about what the outcome was going to be, he would get out and let the people choose whether Rubio or Cruz was the best way to defeat Trump and then defeat the Democrats.
That's really what needs to happen now.
And it's the reason it's not happening.
I mean, Ben Carson also, you know, just pride and ego is keeping him in there.
And Jeb Exclamation Point 2, you know, is staying in there.
Listen to Jeb for a minute.
This is after the debate because his remarks during the debate about Scalia's death were very vague.
And so he was on CNN and she asked him about what Obama was going to do and what Mitch McConnell should do in response.
Given his choices of Supreme Court justices in the past, the Senate of the United States should not confirm someone who's out of the mainstream.
But if I could just clarify, right now, it sounds as though the Republicans who run the Senate aren't even going to schedule a vote.
You think that one should be scheduled?
It's up to Mitch McConnell.
That's really not important to me.
You can see where he gets the exclamation point, can't you?
Yeah, the Supreme Court, the country, you know, whatever.
I mean, listen, this is going to be holy hell.
And so far, the Republicans have not shown that they have the spine, the backbone, to stand up against what is about to be unleashed against them.
Obama's going to pick a left-wing appointment to the bench.
The Republicans are going to make a show of standing up.
They definitely will.
They already have.
And this tidal wave of crap is going to come pouring down on their heads.
And let's see.
Let's see if these guys have the spine.
So here we are.
A Good Question00:03:03
We've lost one of our best men.
America.
American consensus of who we are is in shreds, thanks to 50 years of leftism.
You know, the GOP is spineless.
Our president is an anti-American radical.
So are we doomed?
Are we doomed?
It's a good question.
It's a perfectly good question.
Let me end with this.
It's Washington's birthday.
It's Washington's birthday.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, used to end a lot of his speeches by telling the story of the crossing of the Delaware.
He made a small video about this.
It's just like a minute long.
So let us remind ourselves of what that was like.
All you have to do is think back to Christmas Day, 1776.
Washington had a terrible fall.
He was defeated in Brooklyn Heights in September.
He was defeated in Manhattan.
He was defeated in White Plains.
He was defeated at Palisades.
He was driven across New Jersey.
His army shrank from 30,000 to 2,500.
Think of it.
Less than one out of every thousand Americans was in the field with Washington that Christmas Day.
It was even more desperate than it sounds because one out of every three men in his army did not have boots.
They literally wrapped their feet in burlap bags.
This ragtag army believed in freedom enough and loved America enough that they crossed an icy river at night in the middle of an enormous snowstorm.
They marched nine miles on a dirt road in the ice, leaving a trail of blood.
They shocked and surprised the professional German soldiers at Trenton.
They captured 800 German soldiers at the loss of one American.
Two weeks later, because he'd won a victory, there were 15,000 volunteers, and they drove the British out of New Jersey, and the revolution had been saved.
True story.
True story.
The blood in the snow was real blood.
The feet that shed that blood were real feet.
2,500 men against the most powerful empire on earth.
The beginning of an eight-year war that pretty much went on like that for the next eight years, next seven years.
Ask yourself this.
If you're saying that we're doomed, if you're listening to people who are saying that we're doomed, if you feel that we're doomed, ask yourself this.
What would you have said if you were there to George Washington?
What would you have said to him?
In that moment, in that moment, he had 2,500 guys bleeding from their feet in the snow.
New York was on fire.
He'd lost every battle.
Everything that he'd done had gone wrong.
He was on the run, and he turned around.
Another meaning of the word metanoy, turned around and went back and crossed the Delaware and attacked.
Okay, what would you have said to him?
You know, a day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.
It is not this day.
Puzzle of Persistence00:01:08
This is Washington's birthday.
Remember it when you're talking about the death of a great man, Antonin Scalia.
Stuff I like.
All right.
You know, I always want to recommend video games because I know a lot of people don't use video games.
Video games are kind of in a trough right now.
They've reached a place where the tension between narrative and gameplay, of storytelling and gameplay, has just kind of kept them in this stasis.
And the best games are these little puzzle games that actually use a weird, vague, instead of using narrative, they use a vague suggestion of narrative so that the gameplay can be expansive.
There's a new one out called The Room 3.
It is the sequel to The Room 2, which was the sequel to The Room 1.
You can get it on your iOS here.
And I think they have it for Android too, but I have it on the iPhone.
Absolutely terrific puzzle game.
Just so much fun to play.
Really eerie.
So try that.
The room, you know, try the room one because it's much cheaper.
And then if you like it, go to the room two.
And the room three is really excellent, really one of the best games in a long time.
Neil Desperandum.
Do not despair.
Okay, the fight is on and we will see how it goes.
And we will be here through it all and we'll be back tomorrow.