Ep. 81’s host slams Obama’s Guantanamo closure plan—91 "worst of the worst" prisoners risk reigniting terrorism, with 200 ex-detainees already back in the fight—while mocking Clinton’s support and Cruz’s shifting strategy after Nevada’s Trump landslide. The episode pivots to Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, branding it an Orwellian tool to censor conservatives via vague "dangerous speech" rules, citing Anita Sarkeesian’s Gamergate-linked critiques as ideological overreach. With bans targeting figures like McCain and Yiannopoulos, the host warns censorship fuels radicalization, urging voters to abandon platforms—not Trump—while teasing Oscars fallout. [Automatically generated summary]
President Obama has once again put forth a plan to close the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The prison has been used to house Islamic terrorists who may not be prosecutable under criminal law in the United States.
President Obama says this is bad because it makes the terrorists angry and they go out and kill people.
Unless you know they're in prison in Guantanamo Bay, which they won't be if he closes it.
So you might want to watch out for that.
So far, about 650 of the prisoners at Guantanamo have been released, and about 200 of those are believed to have returned to committing acts of terrorism.
The rest have taken up such pursuits as knitting, macrame, abusing women, and blowing people up.
The 91 prisoners still remaining at Guantanamo are considered the worst of the worst, and President Obama says they will be transported to America while they'll be provided with all the rights of an American citizen, which were, of course, already violated when they were put in Guantanamo, so they'll have to be released.
But don't worry, the likelihood is they'll be sent to Colorado, and I don't live anywhere near there, so we're good.
Even though President Obama's plan will risk freeing the most evil terrorists on earth so that they can kill Americans, the president says it's well worth it because groups like ISIS use Guantanamo as a propaganda tool to recruit terrorists who will kill Americans.
So this will skip a step and save time.
On the campaign trail, the candidates reacted to the president's plan.
Hillary Clinton agreed.
It was high time we closed the prison and got back to the important business of prosecuting people who make videos that offend Islam.
Bernie Sanders said he felt sorry for any terrorists who would be forced to come to America where everything's so unfair.
Donald Trump said he had many terrorist friends and their lovely people, but if they said anything bad about him, he'd sue.
And Ted Cruz parachuted into the prison with a combat knife in his teeth, drew an automatic weapon, and opened fire.
Marco Rubio heard the word Cuba and simply started to tremble and broke out in a cold sweat.
President Obama now moves on to his plan to open diplomatic relations between North Korea and Iran so they can trade tips on how to build nuclear weapons.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Truck.
The sad thing is Obama's plan to free the terrorists, not free them, to bring them here for trial, where they'll then be freed because their rights have been violated.
But that plan was like the least crazy thing that happened yesterday because they had the Nevada caucuses.
And as I'm sure by now you know, Trump won by, I think, I think he had 1011% at this point.
And I love, you know, I love the other candidates are going like, it was a major victory because we got like a half, there was a guy, there was a guy, he loved us so much, he voted for us.
It was like, it was terrific.
So here's Trump celebrating his victory.
Great evening.
We will be celebrating for a long time tonight.
Have a good time.
Have a good time.
You know, we weren't expected.
A couple of months ago, we weren't expected to win this one.
You know that, right?
We weren't.
Of course, if you listen to the pundits, we weren't expected to win too much, and now we're winning, winning, winning the country.
And soon the country is going to start winning, winning, winning.
You know, I hadn't realized this until now.
You know, I've been kind of tough on Trump about the fact that, you know, he's a thug and probably a fascist and he doesn't believe in anything conservative and he's, you know, corrupt and all this stuff.
But now that I realize we're going to be winning, winning, winning, I take it all back.
You know, that's, how can you be, how can we be against winning, winning, winning?
You know, I was stuck.
I was like kind of in an eddy, like, you know, a twig gets in an eddy on a river.
I was like stuck in this whole idea of constitutional liberty and individual choice and, you know, limited government.
But winning, winning, winning is where I want to be, you know.
So now here's Cruz came in third by about 2,000 votes.
It was a virtual tie between Cruz and Rubio.
So if they were, we could just meld the two Cubans, like, is there some like Cuban mind meld where we could move them together?
They would actually have beaten Trump, I think, by only still just by a little bit.
So Cruz, this is Cruz making his speech afterwards.
The undeniable reality that the first four states have shown is that the only campaign that has beaten Donald Trump and the only campaign that can beat Donald Trump is this campaign.
If you are one of the 65% of Republicans across this country who doesn't think Donald is the best candidate to go head-to-head with Hillary.
Who believes we do better in elections when we actually nominate a conservative?
Then the first four states have performed a vital function of narrowing this race and presenting a clear choice.
You can choose between two Washington dealmakers or one proven consistent conservative.
So this raises the musical question, what the hell does he think he's talking about?
I mean, this is like, I've proven that I'm the one campaign that can be, he's getting creamed.
He's not only getting creamed, the evangelicals aren't even voting for him.
They're voting for Donald Trump.
They're voting for the cheat on his wife guy, the abortion guy, the guy, you know, like who doesn't believe, who can't even pronounce the names of the books of the Bible.
He's never asked God for forgiveness because he just tries to be really good so he doesn't need forgiveness.
That's the guy the evangelicals are turning out for here.
So what Cruz is doing, Cruz is having a dream, and Rubio is having a dream, that the other candidates will drop out and all those votes will accrue to them.
That they're something like 65% of the Republican base says, of the Republicans say they won't vote for Trump, so they must be, those votes will go to them.
And the problem is, is that for Cruz, that's an illusion.
For Rubio, I'll talk about that in a minute.
For Rubio, it makes a little bit of sense, but for Cruz, it's an illusion because Rubio is never leaving the race.
I mean, Rubio's plan is that if he just gets enough delegates to cause an open convention, which he's not going to do, but at least it's a game plan, right?
He goes to the convention, and then the establishment pours their money and influence and their whips and their chains into moving the convention to support Rubio.
That's never going to happen for Cruz.
They would support a potted plant before they supported Cruz.
And I mean, if he forced an open election, it would be the end.
And so what everybody's saying, everybody's saying the same thing, especially in the media, everybody's saying the same thing.
Why are these guys, why are Cruz and Rubio attacking each other, but neither of them is attacking Donald Trump?
And in Cruz's case, it's a really good question.
It's a really good question.
If Rubio's never leaving the race and he's not, then why doesn't he turn on Trump and try to get Trump's votes for himself, you know?
And he keeps saying, Cruz keeps saying, we're going to run this campaign at a very high level.
We're going to run it at a very high level.
He said the other day, you've heard how they're attacking me personally, but I'm not doing that.
My question is, like, but that's why you're here.
We love you because you're an SOB.
We love you because everybody else hates you.
The reason people love Ted Cruz, the reason I love Ted Cruz, is because he has no friends.
He has no friends in the Senate.
Why?
Because he does what he has to do.
He does what he'll say he'll do.
And that is anathema to the people in the Senate.
They hate that.
You know, stop doing what you said you'd do.
You know, you're supposed to say it to get elected, and then you're supposed to stop.
And Cruz has never done that.
He's been a complete pain in the neck to everybody who's gone anywhere near him.
And that's why we love him.
That's why he's here.
We love him because he's mean.
He's tough.
He's, you know, he doesn't bend, and suddenly he's turned into a gentleman.
And this is a phenomenon, by the way.
It's called plenty not to lose, basically.
This is a phenomenon.
You see it, you know, I love to play poker, and you get a little bit up and playing poker, and suddenly you stop bluffing, you stop playing aggressively because you just want to keep your chips.
You know, you think like, well, I'm 20 up, and now I lost one, and I'm not, you know, and you don't want to do it.
That's what he's doing.
But really, he's there because he stuck it all on the floor.
He's there because he took these risks.
So now Rubio comes out, and Rubio takes the same tack, but for Rubio, it makes more sense.
Here he is.
He's on to the Today Show, I think.
And they're asking him, why aren't you attacking?
This is what the press is asking everybody.
Why aren't you attacking Trump?
This dynamic seems to be the same.
You've got you and Ted Cruz and some of the other candidates fighting each other and Trump sailing to victory.
A lot of Republicans asking this morning, why not take on Trump directly?
What's your answer to that?
Yeah, first of all, I think you need to take everything that we've applied to the lessons of every other campaign before and throw them out the window.
This is a very unusual year and a very unusual process.
And the Nevada caucuses, by the way, are atypical.
I respect Nevada very much, but last night that process was just different than the rest of the country.
Here's the bottom-line fact.
The vast and overwhelming majority of Republicans do not want Donald Trump to be our nominee.
And that's evidenced by the fact that your own poll last week showed that if it came down to me and Donald Trump, I beat him by almost 16 points.
So what we have now is a dynamic where as long as there are four people running, dividing up the non-Trump vote, you're going to get results like what you saw last night.
You know, it may be true that the vast majority of Republicans don't want Donald Trump, but the vast majority of Republicans hate the Republicans too.
See, the thing is, there's simply no guarantee.
In fact, I don't think it's true, that if Cruz, for instance, dropped out of the race, and the one thing that I think might save this election, might stop us from having this horrific choice between Hillary and Trump, the one thing might be Cruz saying to Rubio, appoint me to the Supreme Court and I'll get out of your way.
That might work.
It might work, but it might not.
And one of the reasons is, is because Trump is a symptom.
Trump is a symptom of what's wrong with the Republican Party, what's wrong with the country, what has been bothering people, has made people so angry.
There's a really interesting piece by Henry Olson.
Henry Olson is one of the smartest observers of elections around.
He usually writes for National Review online.
He's not the most sparkling writer, like he's a wonk.
So he's a little tough to read and people don't really pay attention to him, but his predictions are on point a lot of times.
And he wrote a piece for real clear policy saying it's a very adult piece, okay?
It's what the Republicans should do in terms of policy to replace Donald Trump, to appeal to the people who are voting for Donald Trump.
See, people on air, they like to think about emotions.
They like to think about, oh, you know, Donald Trump is appealing to people who like the sound of his political incorrectness and they like the sound of his macho and they like all this stuff.
But here's a guy talking about actual policy, you know.
And he says it should be obvious by now.
This is Henry Olson writing.
He says, it should be obvious by now that Trump won't be stopped with wishful thinking.
His opponents need to continue to take the fight to him aggressively on his many reckless and false statements, his faux conservatism, and his appalling nativism and vulgarity.
But the other candidates must also offer a realistic economic plan that would be attractive to Trump's supporters.
This is not a new problem.
Since President Reagan left office, the GOP has been struggling to connect with Americans who are culturally conservative but inclined by their working class environment to be suspicious of Republican economic philosophy.
Without strong support from these voters, the GOP has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.
At the same time, it would be foolish for the GOP to abandon its traditional adherence to limited government fiscal discipline, low taxes, and free markets.
Those are the pillars of a dynamic and growing economy, and abandoning them would cost more votes than would be gained.
But belief in a free market is not inconsistent with concern for those who struggle when firms and entire industries come under pressure from global competition.
The GOP must acknowledge the economic dislocation that has occurred and offer an agenda to help families who have seen their prospects dim over the past two decades.
And then he goes on to talk about payroll tax cuts instead of cutting taxes for everybody, which accrues more to the rich, obviously.
He says there should be payroll tax cuts for the working class, wage credits, health care, tax credits for the working class to replace Obamacare and some kind of immigration reform, though he doesn't feel immigration is as big a problem as many people do.
The problem with this, one election ago, all that would have been true.
One election ago, if Mitt Romney had heard that voice and had stopped talking about the 47% who just want to get the good welfare stuff and stuff like that, if he had listened to that fear, if he had heard it, he might have beaten Barack Obama.
Mitt Romney lost.
The poll showed because people thought he didn't care about people like them.
He was a rich guy.
He was a blockhead.
He's like your boss that you don't like that much because he goes to the country club and doesn't, you eat this exhaust from his Rolls-Royce.
And he did not say this.
Now I think it's too late.
People are just too angry.
And we conservatives, we like to talk about the fact that feelings are not the same as facts.
That the Democrats are always talking about their feelings and this feels bad and this feels bad.
And we're always out there with the pointer and the little chart showing yes, but in fact, black people may feel oppressed by the police, but in fact, they're committing all these crimes and the police save more lives and all this stuff.
And we're talking about, yes, when we have free trade, you feel like industries are disappearing.
But really what's happening is the price of goods is coming down in America, which is like you getting a raise.
So suddenly the TV that might have cost $5,000 costs $500, so you just got a $4,500 raise.
That's the way Republicans talk.
The thing is, feelings aren't facts, but the fact that people feel a certain way is a fact, okay?
And you have to address it.
And all the charts and all the common sense in the world doesn't do the trick.
People are screamingly angry.
They are screamingly angry.
And what Trump is doing, Trump is proposing nothing, nothing that will help these people.
He's not got one policy, not one.
I don't even know what his policies are.
Not one policy that will help people economically accept this idea that he's going to deport every Mexican he sees and then let them back into the country.
And I don't know what they think that's going to do.
You know, I don't know how they think that's going to help anybody.
He's going to build a wall and people are angry about immigration.
So that's what he's talking about.
So feelings now are so high.
And that's what a demagogue does, right?
The demagogue plays feelings.
Semi-Serious Gamergate00:10:22
And this is why one of the reasons I keep going back to this free speech issue.
I was talking yesterday about political correctness and how furious it makes people that you can be fired for saying what's the simple truth.
I don't remember if it was yesterday or the day before I was talking about the fact that if you just say, well, there's a lot of crime in black neighborhoods and maybe it's their fault.
Maybe they shouldn't be having children out of wedlock.
You can lose your job.
They're boycotting Chick-fil-A, the fast food store, because the CEO doesn't believe in gay marriage.
They're telling them they can't open stores in certain neighborhoods.
That makes people crazy.
It's not that you have to, it's not that gay marriage is right or wrong.
It's that you have the right to your opinion.
How hard is that?
I don't know.
Have you been paying attention to what's happening on Twitter?
Have you seen this?
I mean, Twitter, I'd like Twitter.
Twitter is a lot of fun.
I'm not one of these guys who gets in Twitter wars.
I like to watch Ben Shapiro get in Twitter wars.
They're lots of fun.
But I'm just too laid-back to do that, basically, and I'm not going to do it.
But Twitter is fun, and it's a really good way to get the news because things that break, people tweet them right away.
Anyway, I like it.
But recently, Twitter has been in the doldrums financially.
They haven't been getting enough people, and they appoint a new CEO, right?
And with the new CAO comes this CEO, comes this new thing.
They start the Trust and Safety Council of Twitter.
This is an unbelievable story.
The Trust and Safety Council just sounds like something from the French Revolution.
You know, it's like, yes, I'm Robespierre, and I run the Trust and Safety Council, and now we will cut off your head.
And that's almost exactly what, you know, minus the guillotine.
That's almost exactly what it is.
Listen to this.
This is the announcement from Twitter that they're going to have this Trust and Safety Council.
On Twitter, every voice has the power to shape the world.
I have to read it in that funny voice because it's so pompous.
We see this power every day from activists who use Twitter to mobilize citizens to content creators who use Twitter to shape opinion.
To ensure people can continue to express themselves freely and safely on Twitter, we must provide more tools and policies because just letting them talk wouldn't make them free or something.
I don't know.
With hundreds of millions of tweets sent per day, the volume of content in Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power.
Well, you can hear where this is going right away.
This Orwellian, you know, it's like now it's shaded from the French Revolution to George Orwell in 1984.
In order to make you free, we have to stop you from saying what you were going to say.
You know, that's how we have to ensure your free people.
So who is on the Twitter Trust and Safety Council?
Well, for one thing, there's this thing called the Dangerous Speech Project, which is out there to stop dangerous speech.
So I looked up, I went to their website, I looked up how they define dangerous speech, and they have this long definition, which is completely unreadable, and part of it is, okay, speech that incites violence.
So, okay, I have some sympathy with that, you know, like Donald Trump standing up and saying you should beat up his hecklers.
I'm not sure that should be, that's such a good thing, especially if something really happens.
But one of their guidelines is a social or historical context.
You have to listen carefully because it's a double speak.
A social or historical context that is propitious for violence for any of a variety of reasons, including long-standing competition between groups for resources, lack of efforts to solve grievances, or previous episodes of violence.
So if ever a black man was attacked by a white man and their blacks and whites can be seen to be competing for resources and there's been a lack of effort to solve grievances and certainly everybody in Black Lives Matter thinks there's a lack of effort to solve grievances.
If you come out and say what you think about the problems in the black community, the problems in poor communities, you are committing dangerous speech.
I mean, this thing can apply to anybody.
But you know what?
We know what it applies to.
It applies to censoring conservatives.
It's about censoring conservatives.
That's what it's about.
One of the other people on this is a woman named Anita Sarkeesian.
Now, once on the air, I called Anita Sarkeesian an idiot, and I actually take that back.
She's not an idiot.
She is just immersed in idiocy.
We all are immersed in these narratives.
And if people, when people are really bright, they break through the narrative and they start to think for themselves and they start to look at the narrative.
She is immersed in this feminist narrative.
And she is one of the main players in something called Gamergate.
And I don't know how many people know about Gamergate.
I don't know if, you know, I'm a video game player, so I know about it.
I did a video about it.
Well, actually, let's show a little bit of the video.
If you pay to, if you subscribe, you get to see my shirt because I put on the shirt.
I got the shirt that that scientist wore when he landed, when they landed that satellite on a meteor and everybody attacked him.
He came on and said, I've done something historic that science has never done before.
And they went, that shirt is sexist.
And the guy started crying.
So I got a copy of the shirt and I wore it on this video about GamerGate, where I try to explain Gamergate.
Go ahead.
It's time to take a semi-serious look at Gamergate.
Now I know some of you out there are saying, Gamergate, what's that?
You annoying little man.
Speak English and tuck in your shirt.
But Gamergate is an important cultural battleground where brave, knight-like gamers are fighting back against the left-wing orcs and trolls and feminists who are trying to monopolize entertainment.
For decades, left-wingers have dominated the arts, using movies, television, novels, and critical articles to sell idiot notions like America is oppressive, capitalism is evil, gender difference is bigotry, and God is dead.
Why were these left-wing knuckleheads able to subvert our culture?
To find out, let's consult conservative culture expert Grampus McFuddydudd.
In my day, we didn't have all this sex and violence in the picture shows.
Women were virgins until they got married or drunk, whichever came first.
That's why.
All right, so I go on to explain in my beautiful shirt that there's, I should have worn the shirt today.
I still have it crumpled up because it actually is a sexist shirt that I would never actually wear.
But I go on to explain that video games, video games are bigger than Hollywood.
A video game can make more money faster than a hit movie, okay?
When you have things, you know, some of these really big hit video games just make billions of dollars.
It has really gone beyond the movie industry.
And it's not just for kids.
Adults play them too.
But because, like most things that were, most things that are new, it was made by men.
It was made for boys who still, they try to say, well, 45% of gamers are women.
Not true.
45% of gamers are women, if you include the people who are playing on their iPhones, little fruit games where you line up the four strawberries in a row.
Serious gamers are almost all men.
I mean, just overwhelmingly men.
And so the things reflect men's point of view, you know, and men's, what men want to play and what men want to enter, what men are entertained by.
One of those things is the drama of rescuing a damsel in distress, okay?
So Anita Sarkeesian, who is now part of the Twitter, you know, whatever this thing is called, the Twitter, you know, safety council, Anita Sarkeesian attacks, goes on and she makes these, she has a website called Feminist Frequency and she makes these videos.
They're kind of pseudo-intellectual videos, to be absolutely honest with you.
They're not stupid, but they're just kind of, you know, she's always, you know, telling you the French term for things.
It actually is pretty amazing.
But she attacks the whole idea.
Here's her attacking the whole idea of rescuing damsels in distress in video games.
The pattern of presenting women as fundamentally weak, ineffective, or ultimately incapable has larger ramifications beyond the characters themselves and the specific games they inhabit.
We have to remember that these games don't exist in a vacuum.
They are an increasingly important and influential part of our larger social and cultural ecosystem.
The reality is this trope is being used in a real world context where backward sexist attitudes are already rampant.
It's a sad fact that a large percentage of the world's population still clings to the deeply sexist belief that women as a group need to be sheltered, protected, and taken care of by men.
The belief that women are somehow a naturally weaker gender is a deeply ingrained socially constructed myth, which of course is completely false.
But the notion is reinforced and perpetuated when women are continuously portrayed as frail, fragile, and vulnerable creatures.
Only an American female surrounded by guns, surrounded by men with guns, could think that it is a myth fundamentally false, that women are not naturally weaker than men.
They're smaller, they're shorter, they have nothing like the upper body strength.
I mean, this is why guns are such a boon for women.
I mean, you know, God made men and women and cult made them equal.
You know, I mean, as long, as long as victory and safety depended on the upper body strength that took the swing a sword, women were chattel, you know?
And the only reason they weren't chatteled in the West is because the West decided they would not be chatteled, because the church decided that they should be treated as something more than chattel, you know, because basically because Jesus liked women.
That's why.
You know, Jesus was nice to women and treated them well.
And so ultimately, the church was stuck with saying, hmm, maybe, you know, when you carry off a woman and rape her, she doesn't belong to you.
You know, maybe you actually have to marry her and take care of her and all this.
So this complete illusion, and because maybe for Darwinian reasons, because men do have to protect women in natural circumstances, they have daydreams about protecting women.
This is what women, this is what women, this is what men daydream about.
What men daydream about is they daydream about saving women from danger.
So when they play, they like to play that they're saving women from danger.
Personally, I think women should be thrilled that men have this daydream, because if men don't have this daydream, the guys who daydream about being a danger to women will have free play.
It's only because nice guys are daydreaming about saving women that women, that the bad guys don't do what they want to do all the time.
That's the only reason.
So this woman is now appointed to the Twitter Orwellian Council.
And what happens?
Immediately, a blogger named Robert Stacey McCain, who's an anti-feminist conservative blogger, is banned.
He's banned.
Silencing The Right Bottles Up Steam00:02:40
I think even before the council was formed, Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a big voice in the anti-Gamergate fraternity, it's a little hard to tell whether Gamergate is the people who are attacking games or the people who are defending the games.
But Milo Yiannopoulos has been defending games, which is great because Milo is a flamboyant gay guy who speaks out for men.
So he's kind of untouchable.
Nobody can say a word about him.
Plus, he's very brave and very outspoken.
He lost on Twitter, and he's a big Twitter guy, and he lost his verification tag, which you get on Twitter, which means you're really Milo.
And all of this has sparked an immense protest, an immense protest.
Milo was trending number three in the world, I think, after he was thrown off.
Free Stacey, hashtag Free Stacy is the fight to save McCain.
But this is going on all over.
It's going on on Facebook too, an organization called Keep Locker Rooms Safe, which is against this new move to allow people who declare themselves women into girls' locker rooms.
So any little creep who just says, oh, by the way, I'm a girl, can go into a girls' bathroom.
I mean, it's insane.
It's incredibly unsafe and insane.
But if you go out and say that this group, Keep Locker Room Safe, was banned from Facebook.
This stuff is real and it's really happening.
And conservatives are responding.
The actor, Adam Baldwin, left Twitter.
He was a huge Twitter guy.
He walked off.
He said, I'm not going to use it anymore.
A lot of people are starting to say it.
But this is the battle we're fighting.
And the reason it's important, of course, just aside from the pure goodness of free speech, is because I know the left thinks that when you silence people, you win.
They think if they silence the right, they'll win.
But the fact is when you silence the right, you are bottling up steam.
You're bottling up a genie.
And when the genie bursts out of that bottle, he's no longer going to be the constitutional conservative that you're listening to right now.
The guy who thinks you should be able to do whatever you please as long as you don't hurt anybody.
The guy who believes in Jon Stuart Mill and the Constitution.
He's no longer going to be me.
You bottle that guy up long enough.
And when he pops out, Donald Trump may not be the half of it.
I mean, Donald Trump may only be the forerunner of what you're going to get if you bottle up the speech of the people you disagree with.
The left is making a serious mistake.
Twitter is making a serious mistake.
Facebook is making a serious mistake.
And this whole notion of conservatism as hate speech has to be destroyed.
It has to be dug up root and branch.
And so anybody who gets attacked on Twitter, people have to go out and support them.
And if they continue to do it, really, Twitter has to be abandoned.
It's already losing market share in a big hurry, partly because of stupid moves like this.
Great American Novels Revisited00:02:48
All right, stuff I like.
So this week, this is the last one, because tomorrow we'll do music.
And somebody yelled at me for doing 40s love songs.
So yeah, I'm actually doing something modern tomorrow, so that's good.
But I've been trying to do classic stuff that's been forgotten, classics that have been forgotten.
I talked about a classic adventure novel that was out of print, Rose of Tabat, a classic Western, I think, The Gunfighter, which nobody looks at anymore.
Nobody even talks about with Gregory Peck.
One of the things I love in literature is what they sometimes call noir literature.
I've always kind of resented that it has a French name because it's such an American form.
You know, we always called them tough guy novels.
It happened sort of with the Hemingway Revolution.
Hemingway kind of revolutionized the way people wrote to make it more American, more blunt, more existentially, more existential in the sense that it just dealt with the things that were there.
And this became such a popular form of writing.
It also seeped into the detective novels and the crime novels and the adventure novels and spawned this genre of tough guy novels that I just love.
I think it is a sub-genre of great American literature.
The one I recommended a long time ago was The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Kaine, which I actually think, if there's such a thing as a great American novel, is right up there with the great American novels.
It is one of the sexiest, you know, toughest books ever written.
But there's a whole group of these books, Nightmare Alley, that people don't hear of anymore.
Nightmare Alley, Maltese Falcon, they hear of.
They shoot horses, don't they?
And I'm generally, as a crime writer, I'm generally considered neo-noir.
I mean, Stephen King compared me to Cornell Woolrich, who was one of the big noir writers, and that's kind of my genre.
And so I've always loved this.
But there's this one book called Black Wings Has My Angel.
Oh, I love this.
This is the, if you can see it, this is the paperback cover.
She had the face of a Madonna and a heart made of dollar bills.
I love that.
But that's classic, classic tough guy stuff.
It was written in 1953 by a guy named Elliot Chase.
It has been out of print forever.
It's about an escaped con and a hooker on the run who get together to pull off a heist.
I mean, you couldn't get more tough guy novel than that.
It's been brought back into print by the New York Review of Books Press, which is one of the great American institutions.
It's been going, I don't know how long, maybe 10, 15 years, something like that.
They are bringing some of the best stuff back into print.
You can almost reach blind for a New York Review of Books Press book and find an undiscovered classic.
But this is one, Black Wings Has My Angel.
Excellent, excellent tough guy stuff.
That's it for the show.
Stop destroying the country, people.
Stop voting for this guy Trump.
He's not your friend.
All right, we'll talk some more tomorrow.
We'll talk a little bit about the Oscars tomorrow because they're coming up on Sunday.