Ep. 76 dissects how Ted Cruz’s 2016 ad featuring actress Amy Lindsay—a former softcore porn star—backfired, alienating evangelicals despite her conservative Christian claims, while Donald Trump weaponized emotional manipulation (border walls, Putin praise) to dominate the GOP. The speaker argues conservatives failed to counter Trump’s demagoguery with cultural savvy, contrasting Cruz’s rigid "Yang" logic with Trump’s adaptability, and praises Madison McQueen’s anti-Clinton rap ad as a sharper, more resonant tactic. Ultimately, the episode frames 2016’s collapse as a clash between principle and emotional intelligence, where moral purity lost to raw political atmosphere. [Automatically generated summary]
Amidst the hurly and occasional burley of a presidential campaign, it can be easy to lose sight of the basic questions that are before the American people.
What the hell is a Burley, for instance?
And also, what do each of the candidates represent?
What are they promising to do for us in return for our vote?
Let's take a survey.
On the Democrat side, there's socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, who's promising to make us more like Europe, a dying society being overrun by Islamic savages that hasn't produced anything particularly worthwhile since the steam engine, Field of Bern.
Then there's Hillary Clinton, who promises she can be Bernie Sanders too, or anything else you want her to pretend to be if you'll just give her the power and position she hungers for so badly.
Also, she promises to be a woman, which would be a first.
For her, I mean.
For the Republicans, we have Senator Ted Cruz, who promises to bring back limited government, to adhere to the Constitution, and to reinstate the traditions of American liberty.
The weasel.
Then there's Senator Marco Rubio, who also promises conservative governance, but handsomer and with a lot of Mexicans running around.
Jeb, exclamation point, Bush, promises he'll never become president, but will manage to take enough votes away from Cruz and Rubio to give the nomination to Trump, ensuring Hillary Clinton ultimately goes to the White House.
Also, he has a nine-point plan to do something, which he'll be happy to show to President Clinton after she takes office.
Dr. Ben Carson promises he's going to make everyone stop picking on him and being so mean.
He doesn't know why people have to be so mean.
It's just mean, that's all.
Next, there's, what's his name, the other guy from Ohio, who also promised something, but I had to go to the kitchen to make a snack and missed it.
And finally, there's businessman Donald Trump, who promises to continue promising things in a loud, aggressive voice that makes angry people feel powerful.
Among the things he's aggressively promising are a wall at the border that Mexico will pay for, a much bigger military that will cost less, no cut in entitlement spending, more jobs from someplace, forcing businesses that have left the country to come back into the country so we can tell them to go F themselves, and why wouldn't they come back for that?
Keeping Muslims out, sending Mexicans back, and shouting abuse at anyone who offends him personally while liking anyone who says nice things about him, including tyrants.
So, when we break it down like that, it's easy to see we should all vote for Trump.
If Hillary Clinton's going to be president, we might as well feel powerful and get to curse at people.
Conservatives And Feelings00:09:36
And free Burley for everyone.
Trigger war.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
What is a Burley?
Actually, I actually know.
These are the kinds of things I actually know, okay?
The word hurling, like to throw something, used to be, is from a German root that used to mean like thunder and chaos and craziness.
So tumult.
Tumult would be a good word.
So it's just a rhyming slang, hurling, burling, hurly, burling.
That's now you know.
We could just go home.
Now you've learned something, I'm done.
All right, so yesterday, because of the death of Antonin Scalia, I didn't get to talk about my own private sex scandal.
I do.
I have a sex scandal.
A porn star ruined my political career, and I have to talk about that.
But we'll get to that later on.
We'll get to the end, because it actually is part of what I'm going to be talking about today.
It's true.
It's all look at this face.
Would I lie to you?
So I had this insight yesterday as we were talking about, we were talking about Scalia and this election and how important it is.
A friend of mine came back from Paris yesterday.
Not yesterday.
He came back recently.
And I was talking to him and he said, Paris is no longer gay.
Using gay in the old sense of gay paris, right?
And he was talking about after the terrorist attacks and everything, the people are just grim and they've kind of lost that sparkle that Paris always had for those of us who do love Paris.
It is a wonderful city.
And he said, you know, it's all about the Islamics.
It's all about these people who are essentially taking over parts of the city, parts of the country, and may erupt in violence at any time and can come in and kill people and aren't assimilating and all this stuff.
And he said when he asked them what they're going to do about it, they said, c'estar, it's too late.
It's too late.
And I was thinking, you know, that it gets to be too late in a big hurry.
You know, Hemingway said that people go bankrupt.
I think it was Hemingway said people go bankrupt very slowly and then very fast.
And that's the way cultures collapse, too.
They collapse slowly.
Things, you know, start to unwind and then suddenly they're gone.
But I was thinking about the fact that it's not too late in America.
Just forget about the Islamic thing, not just about that, but about all our problems.
I was kind of assessing our problems.
And I was thinking, you know, really, really, just looking at the facts of the matter, where we're standing and where we need to get to to get back on track, it's not that far apart.
We're not that far apart.
You know, we don't have the Islamic problem yet that they have over there.
And I think that, you know, it could be an existential threat, but it has to do with figuring out what we stand for and how much of the idea of Islam, not the people, but how much of the idea of Islam we can accommodate.
Because there are ideas in Islam we can't accommodate.
And when President Obama says that those aren't really part of Islam, he's lying.
He's lying to himself.
He's lying to all of us.
And we all see how that works out in the Middle East.
His fantasy world just explodes eventually.
But the rest of our problems, what are they?
We have a tremendous debt, which we could easily, I think, turn around by simply reforming entitlements.
You don't have to suffer too badly to say, look, you're not going to retire at 65 anymore.
When they made that rule, people lived to 63.
When they first had Social Security kick in at 65, people died at 63.
So it wasn't that expensive.
It was like, yeah, you're going to collect your Social Security.
Oops, you died.
But people now live to 80 routinely.
Routinely, they live to 80.
I mean, when Scalia died, everybody was like, oh, my God, this is, he was a 79-year-old man.
His health was bad, and people die.
But you cannot afford to work for 65 years and support a retirement into your 80s.
It just can't be done.
So you reform it.
You don't do it right now.
You do it down the line.
You say, if you're 55, the kind of stuff Paul Ryan is talking about.
Not that big a problem.
The economy, we've had this left-wing president who has sat on the recovery that would have happened.
He's tied an anchor to it in the form of Obamacare and Todd-Frank, you know, Dodd-Frank rules.
All that stuff can be just taken off.
It can be taken off the economy.
The economy will skyrocket.
And if you think that doesn't, you know, you should look, there's an article by Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal today, a 1% difference in growth.
We usually had 4%.
Now we have 2%.
Even 3% would just make such a huge difference in the amount of money you make if the economy were growing bigger.
All these things, all the stuff about all the hysteria about feminism, women have zero institutional problems in America, zero.
They can do whatever they're capable of doing.
No one's going to stand in their ways.
No one's going to underpay them.
It just doesn't exist.
All that stuff is just in the imagination of college girls, you know, getting hysterical after a class.
Women have problems, and there are problems specifically involved in being women, but they're not government problems.
The government can't do anything about them, and the government isn't doing anything to make them worse.
Illegal immigration is a big one, hard to handle.
We're going to have to build a wall, e-verify, but it's possible.
You know what I'm saying?
It's not like, oh my goodness, how are we going to do this?
It's pretty simple.
How you keep people out of the country and what you do with the people who are here already is something that'll be open to discussion once that's done.
Blacks, I guess, always intransigent problems in the communities of the poor.
They're cultural problems.
Those are hard to get rid of.
So I'm not trying to minimize the danger.
With the death of Scalia, we have this thing about the Supreme Court, really, really important.
But our problems in general in this country, looking around where there are places where, you know, your kid gets kidnapped by Muslim terrorists and turned into a soldier and all this terrible stuff.
Looking around comparatively, our problems are not that bad.
But that's not the way it feels.
This was the insight I suddenly had.
You remember that old Jim Crochy song from the 70s, Operator?
But that's not, I try to convince myself that it just isn't real, but that's not the way it feels.
And I was talking yesterday about this intellectual atmosphere that we breathe in.
It's this idea of things that we think we know, but are really just part of the zeitgeist.
They're really just the water we're swimming in.
And we think they're common sense, but they're really just ideas that have taken over the culture at a certain time for various reasons.
They have historical antecedents.
They have all kinds of reasons for being there.
All of us have something like this in our life from our family.
You know, we all come from families where maybe our mother and father voted Democrat and we suddenly realize we're Republican or our mother and father were Catholics and we suddenly realize that we're more comfortable in a Protestant church or vice versa.
Very, very, very hard to get out of that atmosphere.
Very hard to say to yourself, oh gee, dad was wrong.
I see people, I know people who vote Democratic their whole life, their whole lives, while telling me that the Democrats are wrong and stupid and destroying the country.
And yeah, Mitt Romney actually is kind of a guy I could vote for, but I don't know what it is.
It's something, the way he looks, it's the way, you know, it's your dad.
It's your dad.
You can't break with your dad because he told you that he was a lifelong Democrat.
That's it.
That's the kind of power this stuff has.
And I know about this.
I was born a liberal Jew.
I'm a conservative Christian.
I know what it takes to break out of that atmosphere.
It ain't easy.
The thing that I was thinking about is that a lot of what I call this intellectual atmosphere is actually an emotional atmosphere.
And conservatives hate this.
They hate this.
Conservatives, we like to think of ourselves as the male party, the party of facts.
We're the Yang party.
The Democrats are the Yin party.
They're the girl party.
They're into emotions.
It's all about how things feel.
But we're about facts.
But it's really, you know, there's truth to that.
There is truth to that.
But the fact is, even facts are emotional things.
And even emotions are factual things.
This is what women are always trying to explain to men, and men are never quite getting.
You know, women are always coming to you.
Your wife is always coming to you.
You say, I feel this way, I feel that way.
And guys are always saying, who cares what you feel?
The actual situation is this and that.
And then she starts crying and throwing things.
It's terrible.
Maybe that's just in my house.
I don't know.
I'm joking.
I'm joking.
I have to go home after this, so I have to point out that I'm just making a joke.
But we all know that conversation.
We all know that conversation, usually between men and women, but not always.
It's a yin-yang thing.
It's a yin-yang thing that there's this emotional valence.
And it's a fact.
It's a fact about our country.
It's a fact about our country that black people in certain neighborhoods feel hard done by.
You know, you can go to them and say, well, it's blacks killing blacks.
It's not cops killing blacks.
You can say, well, these policing techniques are keeping you safe.
But maybe that doesn't help if your innocent kid goes out and gets searched every time he walks into a department store.
And I've seen that happen.
I've seen a black kid walks into a department store and security is all over him.
Maybe that creates a certain feeling that we do have to address and that as Republicans and as conservatives, we fail to address.
See, the left gets this.
The left gets this.
This is why they took the culture.
This is why they understand.
Take climate change, right?
There are no facts in climate change.
The facts are that it's gotten warmer.
The world gets warmer and colder.
There used to be glaciers.
The Great Lakes used to be ice.
Now it's warmer.
Now it's getting warmer.
But they understand that if they go, it's science.
It's science.
That's not a factual term, science, the way they use it.
It's an emotional term.
And when they start to say, you're a science denier, you're a science denier.
You know, black lives matter.
You go, well, gee, you know, it's really, it's not the cops who are killing you.
It's you who are kids.
Black, what are you, a racist?
What do you, you know, they create, they know how to create an emotional atmosphere.
And there's an example right now is with the Supreme Court.
Emotional Atmosphere vs. Facts00:15:19
You know, Scalia dies, the most conservative jurist, the best conservative jurist we've had in a long time.
And when a liberal jurist retires, we immediately hear, well, he should be replaced with a liberal.
He should be replaced.
So Mitch McConnell comes out and says, I'm not going to replace this guy at all.
I'm not going to replace him at all.
You know, we're just going to wait until the election to see who gets to replace him.
And immediately they start to create this intellectual atmosphere of hysteria.
You know, what?
That's unconstitutional.
That's terrible.
Chuck Schumer, this was my favorite.
This just happens to be my favorite example, but if you read the New York Times, it's the entire paper, basically.
But Chuck Schumer, liberal Senator Chuck Schumer, goes on TV and says, this must not be.
This is a terrible thing.
Here he is.
The kind of obstructionism that Mitch McConnell's talking about, he's harking back to his old days.
You know, he recently he said, well, I want regular order.
But in 2010, right after the election or right during the election, he said, my number one job is to defeat Barack Obama without even knowing what Barack Obama was going to propose.
Here, he doesn't even know who the president's going to propose.
And he says, no, we're not having hearings.
We're not going to go forward to leave the Supreme Court vacant for 300 days in a divided time.
How could this happen?
How could this be done?
Wait, wait, but wait, but wait.
At the end of the Bush administration, 2007, here's Chuck Schumer speaking again.
We should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances.
They must prove.
They must prove by actions, not words, that they are in the mainstream, rather than we have to prove that they are not.
I will do everything in my power to prevent one more ideological ally from joining Roberts and Alito on the court.
Ruttro.
Wait a minute.
You know, just as I was walking in here, our pal Michael Knowles, who's working in the other room, sent me an article from the Weekly Standard that says presidents have made 160 nominations for the Supreme Court.
The Senate confirmed only 124 of them.
And of the 36 failed nominations, the vast majority of them received no up or down vote.
They were pocket vetoed, essentially.
That's what the Constitution says.
The president gets to nominate, the Senate gets to advise and consent, and that's the confirmation.
And once he is confirmed by the Senate, then he can go to the court.
That's the way it works.
And if the Senate don't want to do it, they don't have to do it.
And if they feel this is a radical president, and look, in a year's time, Hillary Clinton may get elected.
It won't matter.
It won't matter, you know, then, you know, whether they stand up to her or not.
But right now, it matters because she may lose, we may win, and that's going to turn everything around.
But because they own, because they own the media, and because we don't understand, because we let them take the movies, we let them take TV, we let them take all this stuff, our universities, they know that they can create this emotional atmosphere that people look in.
What do you mean you don't believe in global warming?
What do you mean that the police are keeping black people safe?
What do you mean they're going to hold up a judge?
Well, we come out with the facts.
We say, well, Chuck Schumer said the opposite.
Yeah, but you don't understand.
This is this emotional atmosphere that they're living in.
And that is what we let them do.
And one of the things that is driving me crazy about this election cycle is that Donald Trump, a lifelong left-winger, understands this.
He understands this and he's doing the same thing.
And we're falling for it.
And this is what's driving me crazy about this.
You know, I kind of wonder why he bugs me so much, besides the fact that I don't think he's a fascist in the sense that he has fascist ideas.
I think he's a fascist like Mussolini as a fascist.
I just think he's a guy who does what's good for Donald Trump.
And he says so.
He says, Putin called me a genius.
No, I like Putin.
Oh, good.
You know, I'm glad you like Putin.
You know, like, that's correct.
You know, the guy's a tyrant trying to take back, trying to, you know, restart the Cold War.
I'm glad he called you a genius.
I'm glad you're happy.
But that's what that's a constitute, what I would call a constitutional fascist.
He's a fascist in his heart, you know.
But he understands this.
People, you know, when a demagogue like Trump comes along, people attribute all these powers to him.
Oh, he's a master.
He's an instinctive.
He has this genius for communicating.
But I think it's us.
I think it's us, you know, projecting our desires and our illusions onto him and him picking up on it, which he does have an instinct for.
And look at the way he does this.
You know, the other, let's go back to the debate.
Trump and Cruz are having it out in the debate about abortion and just his record in general.
So let's listen to this for a minute.
For most of his life, his policies have been very, very liberal.
For most of his life, he has described himself as very pro-choice and as a supporter of partial birth abortion.
Right now, today, as a candidate, he supports federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.
disagree with him on that that's a matter of principle and i'll tell you biggest liar you You probably are worse than Jeb Bush.
You're a liar.
This is the thing he keeps saying to Cruz.
He keeps saying, all this is based on this ad.
Play Cruz's.
Cruz is a great ad about this.
And this stuff, I've researched this.
So everything in this ad, I think, is accurate.
Go ahead.
I'm very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.
That's for sure.
Would President Trump ban partial birth abortion?
Well, look, I am pro-choice in every respect.
But you would not ban it.
No.
And Planned Parenthood?
Planned Parenthood serves a good function.
And Hillary Clinton.
And I think she does a good job, and I like her.
South Carolina cannot trust Donald Trump.
I'm very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.
Don't give him that chance.
Totally accurate ad.
You know, I've said that I think that I said yesterday that I think Cruz would make a great president.
I really believe that.
But I'm not here to front for Cruz.
I'm here to talk to you.
I'm here to tell you what I'm seeing things.
I'm not going to say, you know, Cruz is perfect or anything like that.
But people I know, people I respect, look at Cruz and they say, oh man, this guy, he's sneaky.
Cruz is facially challenged.
Cruz looks like a backwoods preacher.
You know, he does.
He just looks like that guy who makes you want to check your fingers after you shake his hand.
That's what he looks like.
And Trump picks up on this stuff.
That's his thing on Trump.
Liar, liar, liar.
He'll just keep repeating that word.
I can't find a single, I mean, Cruz is a politician.
He skews things to his favor.
He speaks inexactly, especially when he's up on a podium speech.
I can't find a single instance, not one, where Cruz told a true, you know, lie that exposed his integrity.
When Carson was complaining about that thing in Iowa, I played that before Cruz.
Cruz's explanation was exactly accurate.
But Trump knows.
He just has to keep saying, and he does the same thing with Bush.
He's weak, he's weak, he's weak.
That is Bush's face.
I don't think Bush is a weak man.
Look, he was governor of Florida.
I don't think weaklings get to be governor.
They're only 50 states.
If you get one of those positions, you probably know what you're doing.
I think he was a good governor.
I think he would, you know, I'm not sure what kind of president he'd be, but I think he'd be an okay president.
The Bushes tend to be kind of wobbly for me, but okay.
Let's say being okay.
But he just knows he can keep saying he's weak, he's weak, he's weak.
And it's so reflexive with Trump that when Bush brought out his brother W to stump for him, suddenly Trump goes off into this code pink moveon.org conspiracy thing about how Bush, you know, W knew about the WND.
There were no WMDs and he lied.
And that's not true.
We know that's not true.
An independent commission stocked with Democrats went out and investigated it.
Look, Hillary Clinton thought there were WMDs.
John Kerry thought there were WMDs.
Joe Biden thought there were WMDs.
That's what the CIA was telling them.
They're just people.
They're not flying over there with a spy plane.
They're talking to the intelligence people, and the intelligent people got it wrong.
And they only got it partially wrong.
I mean, there were WNDs.
It wasn't a big stockpile.
So I'm watching Trump manipulate people's emotions, which is usually what the Democrats do.
And he's doing it, and we're following him, this Pied Piper, over the hill.
And it really is, you know, he lied when he says, oh, I stood up against the war in Iraq.
Also, not true.
After the fighting started, he said, you know, after the fighting started, he said, if they keep fighting the way they did today, they're going to have a real problem.
You know, well, thank you, Nostradamus.
You know, that's not really that insightful.
So of the people on the stage, the guy who tells the most lies, says the most inaccurate things most often is Donald Trump.
But he knows that if he stays on the offensive and plays into the way people look into their faces, you know, that people will follow him.
So this brings me to my sex scandal, my personal sex scandal.
And it does connect with what I'm saying.
I told you, I wrote these two advertisements for Ted Cruz.
I was asked by my friends at Madison McQueen.
They are the guys, they made their bones on Claven on the Culture.
Let's face it.
I made these guys.
I gave them everything they have, and I can take it up.
No.
They made their bones doing my Claving on the Culture as they went on to start this great business.
And they're working, doing all these clever ads for Ted Cruz.
They got into the top 10 of political ads on YouTube last week.
I mean, they're doing some great stuff.
I wrote two of them for a series that were ultimately called Conservatives Anonymous.
The idea was we were going to do like group therapy things.
And, you know, it started as that idea, and I kind of changed it a little, and it changed as we went along.
So they did release one of these.
And this is not one that I wrote.
I wrote two others, but this is just the one that got out.
So let's play this.
Has anyone else here struggled with being lied to?
Well, I voted for a guy who was a Tea Party hero on the campaign trail, and then he went to D.C. and played patty cake with Chuck Schumer and cut a deal on amnesty.
Does that make you angry?
Angry?
Oh, it makes me feel dumb from trusting them.
Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time.
You guys have room for one more?
Come on in.
I can have Frank's chair.
So he comes in with a Marco Rubio shirt.
You know, you have room for one more.
The girl who says, the actress who says maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face one time.
Turns out that she has been in softcore pornography films.
She's an actress.
This is what she was doing.
These are these films that are on Cinemax.
I know I'm talking to the guys now because I know, you know, you sit up late at night, you have a drink, you're channel surfing, you're watching the sports returns, you watch, you know, the godfather, the last 20 minutes of the godfather.
You turn on Cinemax, and there's two naked babes making it.
You go like, oh, you know, you turn off the sound so you don't wake your wife up and you watch this thing for five minutes and that's what she's doing.
He's like, you didn't know.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Ask your husband.
And if he says no, you know he's lying.
You know, I mean, look, just so you know, I'll tell you how I feel about this stuff.
I don't think porn is particularly good for people.
You know, I think it's debasing and degrading and all this stuff.
But I think the same thing about marijuana, and I think somebody who smokes a reefer now and again is not going to kill himself.
I mean, it's not the best thing you can possibly be doing, but it sets off, in guys, it sets off a little zing of pleasure in your mind, and I'm not going to tell you I don't do it on occasion.
I'm not going to tell you if I'm surfing, channel surfing, and I come on that film, that my hand doesn't stop for a couple of minutes, and I watch.
I'm just being honest here.
All right, so the Cruz campaign found out about this, and they canceled the ad, okay?
So my ads have been canceled.
So I can now tell people that my political career was ended by a porn star.
That's literally true.
Now, I shouldn't call Amy, her name is Amy Lindsay, and I shouldn't call her a porn star.
She's an actress.
She did these things.
She's a conservative.
She's a Christian.
She's an intelligent, charming woman.
She came into these things.
I was there for the rehearsals, not the filming.
In the rehearsals, she was making suggestions and ad-libs and all this stuff.
She was so happy to be among her fellow conservatives.
And I think she's devastated by this.
She's devastated that this thing has taken her off the air.
I don't know how she feels about these porn things.
She's very, you know, she doesn't like to be called a porn star, and she's not.
That's not what she is.
And she points out that these are all softcore.
They're not, you know, horrible, those horrible clinical things that, you know, Erica Jong said for the first five minutes they make you want to have sex and the rest of the time they make you never want to have sex again.
You know, not those things.
These are these softcore things.
And the Cruz campaign's reaction was purely tactical.
Okay, it was tactical.
They're trying to appeal to evangelical Christians.
They don't want to alienate evangelical Christians.
They don't want to be distracted by that conversation.
Now, she gets this.
She was on Jake Tapper.
You can hear how intelligent and charming she is.
She's on Jake Tapper's show on CNN.
And she herself said this is not about being un-Christian or judgmental or anything.
I don't think it's un-Christian.
I think this is politics as usual.
It was done in a snap moment.
Someone's got to make a decision.
And sometimes it's just better to take it down.
And from what I've heard, they are reevaluating the rest of the campaign.
I've actually gotten a lot of support on the right from a lot of people that think the Ted Cruz campaign might have acted hastily and like, hey, this is also the type of person who might be voting in this race.
You know, it's not just the white male Christian gun-toting people.
It's people like me.
See, I agree with her.
I don't think they were being bad Christians.
We all know that only he who is without sin, him who is without sin, is allowed to throw the first stone.
And I don't think Ted Cruz was saying, oh, this evil woman and all this.
They just thought this is going to get in our way.
This is going to get in the way of our campaign.
I have a dog in the fight.
I didn't like my ads being canceled, to be absolutely straightforward with you.
But at the same time, I think it was a tactical error.
It's a minor point.
It's a minor point.
It has nothing to do with whether Cruz would be a great president or not.
It has nothing to do with him as a person or a candidate.
I think his campaign made a tactical error, and I will tell you why.
And I'll tell you why it matters, okay?
We're talking about this emotional atmosphere that we live in, this intellectual, emotional atmosphere.
Right this minute is an emotional atmosphere where people know that something has gone terribly wrong.
We were talking about it yesterday.
A consensus has collapsed in America.
This I know to be the case.
Something, the reason things feel so bad, even though they're not so bad, is we don't know how we're going to bring everyone together again the way they used to be, where we used to, Democrats and Republicans were always arguing over three yards off the 50-yard line.
With Obama, that has changed.
He is 30 yards off the 50-yard line, and he is in the red zone, and we all know it, and we all know that this is really a danger to our country.
When we've lost Scalia, it's a danger to our country.
That is why the emotional atmosphere is so charged, so bad.
Okay.
Emotional Collapse00:04:40
In a moment like this, when people know things aren't working, they know things are going wrong.
If you, you know, those polls that say, are we going in the wrong direction, they all say, like, you know, 100% of people think we're going wrong.
There's six guys, you know, in Vermont who think we're going in the right direction.
Bernie Sanders and like five other guys think we're, this is great the way things are going.
Everybody else knows things are going wrong.
We've lost this consensus about our traditions.
And the reason we've lost it, part of the reason is we've lost our faith in the underlying philosophy that fed into that tradition.
I'm not even talking about faith in God, faith in Jesus, although I am talking about that, but I'm talking about the philosophy that grows up out of that, the tower of freedom and democracy that rests on that religion.
We've lost that.
If the people who believe in that don't understand how to create an emotional atmosphere of welcome, of generosity, of forgiveness, the very things that made the religion catch on in a time in Rome when things also, when a republic also had just fallen, when a republic also had disappeared and tyranny had replaced it, that's what made Christianity so appealing when it first started out, was this atmosphere of welcome, of love, of agape, you know, of this thing.
If we can't communicate that constantly, I get letters so often, I cannot tell you, that are so pompous.
You know, I know they're well-meaning, but I'll say something about Christianity and they say, no, you got that wrong.
You got that wrong.
I'm sorry.
It's not, you know, it's not the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It's the Father, the Holy Ghost.
You know, it's some little point of theology that they think they have exactly that I misspoke.
And I just always want to say to them, you know, do you think that kind of pomposity, that kind of self-righteousness is serving God or is it serving you, you know?
And I just think in this case, as a tactician, as a political tactician, and as a cultural tactician, if Cruz had said, hey, you know, you want to throw stones at her, go away.
Go ahead.
I don't even know who, how would I know she was in porn?
I don't watch porn.
But if you were watching it and you saw that and that upsets you, too bad, you know?
Throw the stones if you're with us.
He would have sold himself.
He would have gotten rid of some of that atmosphere that hangs around him that Trump is playing on.
So as a tactician, I think that the right, the people on the right who are so fact-based, so constitution-based, so philosophy-based, need to get a feel for some of this emotional intelligence that the left and Donald Trump use so well in order to sell the good.
You can do it without, you don't abandon your principles.
You don't say, oh, porn is great.
That's not the point.
You just forgive.
You just kind of do what Jesus told you to do, but you do it out in the open where people can see instead of being so clever tactically and so stupid emotionally.
I think, you know, I want to end, I'd like to do stuff I like, but I, you know what?
I think for stuff I like, I'll just point out that Madison McQueen came back with a great ad against Hillary Clinton.
If you saw Office Space, there's this hilarious scene in the old comedy office space where they can't get this printer to work.
So they take it out in a field and they just beat the crap out of it.
They just destroy it.
So Madison McQueen has made this new ad where Hillary Clinton and her gang go out and take out a server, you know, like her email server, and they just destroy it.
And so that's what you'll be watching if you can watch, if you're subscribing.
But if you're listening, you'll hear the rap song that goes along with it.
It's good to be a Clinton.
So we'll use this for stuff I like, this great Cruz ad that comes back after we lost my brilliant ads, but that came out with even more brilliant ads.
Play that.
Damn, it feels good to be Clinton.
Damn, it feels good to be a Clinton.
A shameless politician always plays her cards right.
Got a crew for the fight on the airwaves.
Left dogs in the press keep their mouths tight.
Cousin Clinton never needs to explain what.
Why it is what they done oh and who.
A real Clinton knows that they're entitled.
And you don't get to know what they do.
What difference does it make?
A Clinton plays a victim for promotion.
A Clinton kills it off with a smile.
Damn, it feels good to be a Clinton.
A server full of secrets ain't no thing.
Damn, it feels good to be a Clinton.
Lies, corruption, Clinton I love that That's how it's done.
That is how you play into people's emotions, honestly, because this is absolutely legitimate ad.
And that is how it's done.
And that's how this is done.
And we are done.
So we'll talk some more tomorrow about more things.