Donald Trump’s 2016 rally tactics outmaneuvered opponents despite his "rigged system" claims, while North Carolina’s bathroom law—backed by Gov. Pat McCrory—sparked boycotts from Michael Moore and Ringo Starr over its surgical requirement for transgender access, exposing a cultural clash between self-identification and legal consistency. Critics like Rep. Adam Kinzinger dismissed Trump’s election fears as baseless, yet his primary dominance proved his strategy’s sharpness, contrasting with leftist "induced insanity" narratives—from climate censorship to Islam speech bans—that the host ties to Christianity’s decline and Supreme Court overreach, urging Hillsdale College’s constitutional courses as a safeguard. The episode frames identity politics as a battleground where absurdity, like Washington University students questioning age claims but accepting gender fluidity, reveals deeper ideological fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
Talking About North Carolina's Transgender Bathroom Law00:05:44
Controversy continues to spread over North Carolina's new law that prohibits men who think they're women from using bathrooms reserved for women who think they're women and are actually women.
The law also prohibits women who think they're men from using men's rooms, even if the men in the men's rooms keep saying, come on in, it's all right, you'll like it here, and then giggling behind their hands.
In protest against the new law, filmmaker Michael Moore has refused to release his new movie in North Carolina.
The movie, entitled, Everything's So Distorted by My Lies It Seems Like the Opposite of What It Really Is, looked set to make as much as $7 in the Tar Heel State in the event someone walking by the theater caught the scent of popcorn and just couldn't resist running in to buy the extra jumbo size.
On hearing that Moore would not release his new film in his state, NC Governor Pat McCrory fought back tears saying, quote, thank you, thank you, thank you.
This is the best day of my life.
I'm so happy.
Thank you, thank you, unquote.
The governor added that if Mr. Moore would agree to permanently boycott North Carolina, he would be willing to ban everyone from women's bathrooms, even women.
Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr also protested the North Carolina law by announcing that he was still alive and was canceling a concert he had scheduled in the state for June 18th.
Mr. Starr told reporters, quote, sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman, but she was another man.
If she leaves her home in Boone, North Carolina, where's she going to use the can?
Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged, unquote.
Transgender activist Leslie Confusion told reporters he or she felt the law was unjust.
Under this law, if I identify as Chinese, I would be banned from eating mushu pork, said Confusion, who also goes by the name Lin Wu.
Wu, or Confusion, said, quote, if the people who think they're something they're not aren't going to be allowed to determine the nature of reality, then who will?
Or to put it another way, Don Chai Kanhao Tang Li Tzou, which isn't Chinese, but thinks it is.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I almost made it.
Come on.
Oh, well.
All right.
The nature of the war against reality continues.
We're going to talk about that and, of course, about the New York primaries taking place today.
But first, a word from our lovable sponsor, Hillsdale College, which has a new course.
You know what?
I've begun to feel, I begin to feel that the candidates should be forced to not only take these courses, but then be quizzed on them.
And then you get delegates for the, you know, you want to talk about a rigged system.
I want a system where they have to be quizzed on Hillsdale College's course, courses on the Constitution, and this one on the presidency, because this one teaches us that the American presidency is the most powerful office in the world, but it isn't a monarchy.
I can think of several candidates who would fail that question right there.
So many of the current candidates view the presidency as the accumulation of all three powers, the legislative, executive, and judicial.
That is not how the framers designed it.
Learn about the separation of powers and how to restore constitutional restraints in the free Hillsdale College course, The Presidency and the Constitution, at hillsdale.edu slash Andrew.
Sign up for free at hillsdale.edu slash Andrew.
Get a new lesson every week right in your inbox from Hillsdale's professors and learn how the Constitution protects us from would-be dictators.
You know who else ought to take this course as the Supreme Court justices?
They went and argued before them yesterday, I guess it was, that Obama doesn't have the right to change the law on immigration.
And it's like, baby, they're stroking their chins.
Wait, really?
So he's supposed to execute the law.
That's why they call him the executive and the legislators are supposed to legislate.
These guys just have not gone to Hillsdale College.
All right, New York primaries are today.
We don't have any numbers or anything.
So let's talk first about this North Carolina bill.
I don't actually, I want to talk about the North Carolina bill, but I want to talk about the kind of something, an underlying principle to this bill that really, really gets to me.
The bill basically says, if you go and have an operation, actually change your sex, if you have an actual sex change operation where you change your genitals, a word that is related to the word gender, because that's how we determine what gender you are, you are allowed to legally change your sex.
But if you just declare that you're a woman or the other sex, you cannot go into the bathroom.
Okay.
So something like 160 businesses are threatening boycotts, rock stars, you know, Pearl Jam, Ringo Starr.
They're canceling their concerts and so forth.
Chuck Todd has the governor on, and of course, the press is uniformly in favor of against this bill.
And so Chuck Todd has the governor, Pat McCroy, on, and he really grills him, and he says, don't you have any regrets about this now that this is going to cost millions and millions of dollars?
The state is going to be out millions of dollars if these protests come through.
Here's the governor's answer.
The city of Charlotte passed a bathroom ordinance mandate on every private sector employer in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the largest, 15th, 16th largest cities in the United States of America.
And I think that's government overreach.
It's not government's business to tell the private sector what their bathroom, locker room, or shower practices should be.
Not only the private business, but also the YMCA and other nonprofit organizations.
And by the way, this is what 29 other states also do not have these types of restroom, locker room, and bathroom policy.
So the state law was passed to counter the Charlotte law.
The Charlotte law was backed by the Charlotte Business Guild, whose president, Shad Severance, he was like the leader who forced this bill down the throats of the people of Charlotte.
Shad Severance is a registered sex offender who was convicted of sexually molesting a little boy in 1998 when he was working as a youth minister.
Lies Lead to Censorship00:12:41
I wish I were making this up, but I'm not.
This is really.
And, you know, I want to be clear about this, that I have no bias against people who are sexually weird.
I mean, the whole world is a little sexually weird, if you ask me.
Everybody has got his own thing, whatever floats your boat.
I seriously have not ever lost a minute's sleep over worrying about what turn other people on.
And you have the absolute right to be turned on whatever way you are.
The world is a complex place.
I certainly believe that the marriage between a man and a woman is at the center of human life.
But just because things are off-center doesn't make them bad.
Many off-center things are perfectly fine and fun and whatever.
You know, I'm not trying to get in anybody's way, but I am talking about the nature of reality.
I will point out, by the way, that transgender people, as anyone who is on their side will tell you, transgender people are not necessarily gay, okay?
So a man can identify as a woman and still be attracted to women.
So you're talking about a guy with full equipment who says he's a woman going into a woman's bathroom who's attracted to women.
It strikes me as a somewhat dangerous situation.
It seems to me that the danger to the majority of people is a lot worse than the danger of this guy getting bullied in a men's bathroom, which is not going to happen anyway.
So I want to play, I'm going to play a long portion of a video that was made by the Family Policy Institute of Washington.
And this kid, Joseph Backholm, and if you're not watching this, if you're just listening to it, he's a 5'9 white guy, goes onto Washington University, I think it is, the campus of Washington University, and he asks these kids, if I identify as a woman, you know, is that all right with you?
And they say, yes, it is.
And then he ups the ante.
And I'm going to play it for quite a long time because it really is worth watching.
And it hits exactly, you know, on the button, what bothers me about this issue.
Go ahead.
So if I told you that I was a woman, what would your response be?
Good for you.
Okay, like, yeah.
Nice to meet you.
I'll be like, what?
Really?
I don't have a problem with it.
I'd ask you how you came to that conclusion.
If I told you that I was Chinese, what would your response be?
I mean, I might be a little surprised, but I would say, good for you.
Like, yeah, be who you are.
I would maybe think you had some Chinese ancestor.
I would ask you how you suddenly came to that conclusion and why you came to that conclusion.
I would have a lot of questions, just because on the outside, I would assume that you're a white man.
If I told you that I was seven years old, what would your response be?
I wouldn't believe that immediately.
I probably wouldn't believe it, but I mean, it wouldn't really bother me that much to go out of my way and tell you, no, you're wrong.
I'd just be like, oh, okay, he wants to say you're seven years old.
If you feel seven at heart, then so be it.
Yeah, good for you.
So if I wanted to enroll in a first grade class, do you think I should be allowed to?
Probably not, I guess.
I mean, unless you haven't completed first grade up to this point and for some reason need to do that now.
If that's where you feel like mentally you should be, then I feel like there are communities that would accept you for that.
I would say so long as you're not hindering society and you're not causing harm to other people, I feel like that should be an okay thing.
If I told you I'm six feet five inches, what would you say?
That I would question.
Why?
Because you're not.
No, I don't think you're six foot five.
If you truly believed you're six's five, I don't think it's harmful.
I think it's fine if you believe that.
It doesn't matter to me if you think you're taller than you are.
So you'd be willing to tell me I'm wrong?
I wouldn't tell you you're wrong.
No, but I'd say that I don't think that you are.
I feel like that's not my place as like another human to say someone is wrong or to draw lines or boundaries.
No, I mean I wouldn't just go like, oh, you're wrong.
Like that's wrong to believe in it because I mean again it doesn't really bother me what you want to think about your height or anything.
So, I can be a Chinese woman.
You, um, sure.
But I can't be a six foot five Chinese woman.
Yes.
If you thoroughly debated me or explained why you felt that you were six foot five, I feel like I would be very open to saying that you were six foot five or Chinese or a woman.
So this five foot nine white guy ends up as a six foot five Chinese woman, okay?
Now, let's leave aside the idea that eventually, eventually, it's going to hit upon some guy to have the idea that he can just try out for a woman's track team or a woman's sports team, just identify as a woman and blow all the women off the track, you know?
I mean, forget about any of that.
Those kids are suffering from induced insanity.
They're suffering from induced insanity.
Something has obviously gone terribly wrong with their values.
And here's what I think it is, and here's why I think it's important and dangerous.
Because, you know, this is a white boy's problem, this thing about bathrooms, okay?
This is an uptown problem.
This is for a country that is so rich and so powerful that it really doesn't have any problems, real problems to speak of, and so they're debating nonsense.
We're debating nonsense.
No kid with starving to death trying to find clean water in Africa with flies on his eyes worries about whether a transgender guy can use the bathroom.
But this is induced insanity.
I've said this a million times that leftism is Christianity with Christ removed from it.
I mean, obviously, you know, Jesus says, judge not lest you be judged.
You know, remove the plank from your own eye before you remove the moat from another person's eye.
He's about compassion.
He answers each person from that person's own heart a lot of times.
When you remove him, I mean, our whole culture is built like a Jenga tower on that stick, you know.
And when you remove that bottom stick, everything goes insane because you've removed the center of reality.
You've removed the center of objective reality, which is God, right?
Which is God, as we know him as man.
You know, that's when you remove that, you've got nothing.
And suddenly you're talking about insanity.
You're talking about a five-foot-nine.
And it's funny, it is funny.
And even the kids are laughing.
God bless them.
Thank God they have enough sanity left to be laughing at themselves.
But it's also not funny.
It's not funny because in order to support a lie, you have to get everybody else to lie with you.
And that is why lies lead absolutely, irreversibly, and inevitably to censorship and oppression.
It's the emperor's new clothes.
In order for the emperor to go out naked and think that he's clothed, everybody has to agree.
It takes one voice, it takes one little boy in the story to say the emperor isn't wearing any clothes for the emperor to suddenly realize that he's naked, okay?
And that's where so much of this stuff comes.
All this stuff on campus about microaggressions.
How unsteady in yourself do you have to be before a microaggression ruins your self-image?
I mean, I get called horrible, horrible names every day, and that's just by my wife.
No, I'm joking.
No, I mean, I get, in all seriousness, I get called names so bad I can't even tell my wife about them.
You know, I tell my wife everything, but I can't tell her what people say about me online because it doesn't move me even a centimeter off my center because I know where my center is.
It's only if you have lost that center that somebody's microaggression is going to bother you.
It's only if you feel that you're a bad guy, if you feel there's something wrong with your homosexuality, that somebody sniffing at you or saying some small thing or making some small faux pas is going to undermine your entire sense of personality.
So you have to silence them.
You have to silence them.
If you believe that the government, if you want people to believe in climate change, they're now talking, Loretta Lynch, one of the most sinister people in America, as far as I'm concerned, the Attorney General, is actually considering bringing charges, criminal charges against people who don't think there's a problem with climate change, who don't think climate change is a major emergency, because it's obviously not.
I mean, if it were, people, you know, Al Gore wouldn't be flying around on private jets, living in mansions, if he really thought that that was destroying, irreversibly destroying our environment.
So that has to be censored.
Every lie requires censorship.
Every lie ultimately requires the world to conform.
And I think, you know, this includes our dealings with Islam.
Again, you know, this is not about hating people.
It really isn't.
They like to pose it that way.
If you go on Google and try and find out what's in the North Carolina law, as I've been doing for two days, trying to find out what is actually in the law, you have to go through pages and pages and pages of anti-North Carolina propaganda before you can even find out what's there, before you can even find out what's in the law, because the entire press has gathered together to enforce this lie, this lie that a man can declare himself a woman without changing himself and thereby be a woman.
It is a lie.
And it includes the way we deal with Islam.
When people have to say, Islam has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, as Hillary Clinton does.
When in Europe, you can get arrested.
The police can come to your door and take you away if you tweet something judged defamatory against Islam.
Why?
Because they know there's a problem.
They know there's a problem.
In Germany, they're allowing a comedian to be prosecuted for insulting the thuggish president of Turkey, Adoyan, I think it's pronounced, Adoyan, yeah.
They're allowing him to be prosecuted under a law in Germany.
They say they're going to repeal the law, but meanwhile, they're prosecuting this guy because Adoyen's a thug, and he doesn't want people to say he's a thug.
This is a guy who had his goons beat up protesters, anti-Turkish protesters in Washington, D.C., in our country, in our house.
He came in and beat up protesters, had protesters beaten up.
We can't say he's a thug because he's a thug, because he's a thug.
If he weren't a thug, we'd be able to say he's a thug.
You can say, I'm a thug, I don't mind, because I'm not.
You know, you cannot say a Dorian's a thug because he is.
So everywhere that lies hold sway, censorship follows.
I'm going to, just before I go into our second commercial, I just want to read you one brief paragraph.
I have an article up now in City Journal, Google City Journal, and you'll find it.
The article is called The Silent Nasty, and it's about how our political conversation got to be so abased and so dirty and angry and Trump-like.
Trumpian, I think, is a good adjective.
The mental tyranny that goes by the name of political correctness wrongly assumes that the human heart is infinitely malleable and that words can endlessly reshape the reality of its experience.
Force people to declare that all cultures are morally equal and morally equal those cultures will become.
Demand we pretend that gender differences are a myth and gender differences will disappear.
Shame us out of noticing the color of a criminal's skin and crime statistics will lose their power.
But it just doesn't work.
The eyes see what they see, the heart knows what it knows, bottle up the human experience in silence and it will ultimately break forth in rage.
And that's what I think is happening to our political conversation now.
And I think that if we don't stand up for reality, we don't have to stand up for ugliness and hatred and judging people.
You know, compassion is the right way to go, but compassion in light of the truth.
And your privacy is under attack, which is another thing I wanted to bring up.
Big tech companies are scanning your emails and targeting you with unwanted advertisement.
You know, I went out and bought an elliptical machine, and I was shopping online for an elliptical machine, and for months afterwards, all I would get were pictures of bare-chested men.
You know, I thought, like, what are people going to think I was looking at?
So you don't like big tech companies scanning your emails and targeting you with unwanted advertising.
Government agencies are collecting data at alarming rates and collecting alarming amounts of data.
Take back your privacy by getting your name at Reagan.com as your email address.
Privacy Under Attack00:03:35
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You know, one of the many things I like about Ted Cruz is that he stands up to these guys on these questions.
He did what they call these town halls on Good Morning America.
And he's there with their reporters, these Democrat hacks.
And a guy in the audience asks the question.
The guy says he's gay and he has a husband.
And he's talking about all these laws, like this North Carolina law.
And he says, what are you going to do as president to protect me, knowing that Cruz is kind of on the other side of this issue?
Here's Cruz's unwielding but polite and reasonable response.
What would you as president do to protect me and my husband from that institutionalized discrimination?
Well, listen, when it comes to religious liberty, religious liberty is something that protects every one of us.
It is the very First Amendment, the very first phrase protected in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.
And religious liberty, it applies to Christians, it applies to Jews, it applies to Muslims, it applies to atheists.
And all of us, we want to live in a world where we don't have the government dictating our beliefs, dictating how we live.
We have a right to live according to our faith, according to our conscience.
And that freedom ultimately protects each and every one of us.
And we shouldn't have the right to force others to knuckle under and give up their faith and give up their belief.
And for me, I mean, I have spent my entire adult life fighting to defend religious liberty, fighting to defend the freedom of every one of us to seek out and worship God.
And I think keeping government out of the way of your lives protects the freedom of every one of us.
But when you talk about freedom, and what he referred to with his husband, a lot of people would say, doesn't everybody have the freedom to be treated equally?
Don't we all have the freedom to be equal?
Of course we do.
And the First Amendment protects everyone equally.
It protects our faith.
It protects the faith of an Orthodox Jew to follow his or her faith without the government getting in the way and regulating kosher delis and restricting what can be served.
It protects the freedom of all of us.
You know, you supported a constitutional amendment that would have the effect of overturning the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage.
So what would that mean for couples like Todd and his husband who already are married?
Well, listen, I am a constitutionalist, and under the Constitution, marriage is a question for the states.
That has been the case from the very beginning of this country, that it's been up to the states.
And so if someone wants to change the marriage laws, I don't think it should be five unelected lawyers down in Washington dictating that.
And even if you happen to agree with that particular decision, why would you want to hand over every important public policy issue to five unelected lawyers who aren't accountable to you, who don't work for you?
Instead, if you want to change the marriage laws, convince your fellow citizens to change the laws.
And by the way, it may end up that we've got 50 states, that the laws in one state may be different than another state.
And we would expect that.
We would expect the people of New York to adopt different laws, perhaps than the people of California or Texas or Florida.
And that's the great thing about a big, diverse country is that we can have different laws that respect different values.
Power Of A Strategy00:05:37
You know, if it weren't for Donald Trump doing a deafening imitation of telling the truth, I think that Republicans who have been frustrated by candidates who don't stand up for their beliefs would see that that's what the truth sounds like.
That's what a guy—and you know what?
Cruz is— Cruz is probably to the right of me on this issue.
But what he said, I respect what he said.
He described it.
He was polite.
He was courteous.
But he also stuck to his guns.
And you saw the press pile on.
There is nobody in that newsroom.
And if there is, he keeps his opinion to himself.
There's nobody in that newsroom who disagrees.
An argument has never taken place in that newsroom where somebody took the other side.
And that's the problem with these newsrooms is they become radicalized by being surrounded by people who agree with them.
And they all are on the same side.
So now the New Yorkers go to the polls, and it is looking very good for Donald Trump.
Here is the Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump closed his New York campaign with a rally in Buffalo, billed as one of his biggest indoor events, a show of strength reflecting his ambition to notch a home state landslide on Tuesday and the GOP nomination by June.
Monday's rally, which drew an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 people.
I mean, these are huge rallies.
It was also a show of defiance at a time when his leading rival in the GOP race, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has demonstrated he can win over delegates in contests that reward organizational flair over mass appeal, boosting the chances of a contested Republican convention.
Polls show Mr. Trump in reach of winning all 95 of New York's delegates.
That would be huge.
It was a sweep that would enhance his chances of clinching the nomination before the July convention.
The real estate developer has repeatedly bashed party rules that have allowed Mr. Cruz to elect loyal delegates in states won by Mr. Trump.
Those pro-Cruz delegates could deprive Mr. Trump of victory at a contested convention.
Cruz says that's what he thinks is going to happen.
Play cut four, the first Cruz cut.
In all likelihood, we're going to go into a contested convention, which means nobody has a majority.
And I'll have a ton of delegates.
He'll have a ton of delegates.
And it's going to be a battle in Cleveland to see who can get to a majority.
You can't get the nomination without earning a majority of the delegates elected by the people.
And I believe Donald's highest total will be on that first ballot, and he will go steadily down because Donald cannot win.
And we don't want to nominate someone who's a loser in November.
You know, Trump, of course, is making all this noise that if he goes in there with a lot with the most delegates and doesn't get the nomination, they're going to be riots.
He's threatening.
And some people are kind of falling for that.
They're going in for the battered wife syndrome.
Best to be quiet, best to obey, so I don't get hurt.
My personal opinion is if he goes in there with one less delegate that he needs than he needs, not only should Cruz pull the nomination out from under him, he should steal his socks and his underwear and tie his shoelaces together so he trips when he chases after him.
I mean, I just think like, you know, if you don't win it, it's an open convention.
Tough nuggets.
So John Heileman, who is this wonderful political reporter for New York magazine, he's got this great show on HBO called The Circus, which is on hiatus, but when it comes back in July, you should really check it out.
They do a half-hour sweep of the week in politics, basically, until the presidential election.
And it's been really insightful and interesting.
Heilman's one of the reporters on it.
But John Heilman describes why this strategy of Trump's to attack the rules of the delegate gathering, why it's so brilliant.
It's such a brilliant strategy, which I agree it is a brilliant strategy.
So listen to Heilemann describe it.
This particular moment where he left Wisconsin in the worst position he's been in throughout the entire race.
Right.
And how he managed to make this turn.
If he ends up being the Republican nominee, we will look at this as the moment when he displayed the most political sophistication of any moment in the entire campaign.
A lot of other times where Trump has just bullied through things, or he's just been his strength.
People attacked him.
He made mistakes.
He got struck by sucking energy out of the attacks.
This has not been a visceral thing.
This has just been a smart thing.
This has been kind of the like, okay, I'm in trouble.
I have New York coming up.
Let's see what's going on out here and how I can jujitsu something that's ostensibly a negative for me, which is to say I'm losing delegates to all these states, and turn it into a message, as Nicole said, that he's been more consistently on and that it's more obviously on brand than anything else he's done.
It's just the sophistication of it, of this.
Trump has not been particularly sophisticated throughout this campaign.
This is a moment where he's really displaying strategic and tactical deafness.
We're going to find out today how much that works.
But I just want to add this one thing.
Congressman, Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is a Republican, says he can't vote for Trump.
He prefers Kasich.
He's kind of a moderate.
He prefers Kasich, but he could find his way to vote for Cruz.
And he explains to Wolf Blitzer why everything that Trump is saying, no matter how clever to strategically, why it's obviously false.
Trump's argument is that the establishment has rigged the system.
That's what he keeps saying.
It's his whole campaign.
The establishment has rigged the system at the border.
The establishment has rigged the system on trade and on jobs, on everything.
Now the establishment has rigged the system of the election.
And Kinzinger explains why that's ridiculous.
Is the process rigged, as Trump alleges?
No, I mean, look, if the process was rigged, you would not have Ted Cruz and Donald Trump as the two frontrunners for the Republican Party right now.
Silicon Valley Gambit00:04:00
You'd have somebody else.
So, no, it's not rigged.
It's just the rules.
Each state chooses to do it differently.
It's a state.
You know, we believe in federalism, the strength of the state.
The state can choose, the state parties can choose how they want to do nominations.
We do a primary in Illinois.
Some places do caucuses.
It's the rules.
The rules are known.
And Donald Trump basically, and all he brags about being able to, you know, bring people together and make deals and all this kind of stuff, he's unable to simply run for president.
You know, it's like it really is fascinating in politics how the power of an argument, the power of a strategy.
Even when you tell people it's a strategy, even when you go on television again and again and say it's just a strategy, strategies have power that overwhelms the truth.
But the truth continues to be important, and we're going to find out how important it is to New Yorkers.
We will find out how this whole thing plays out tonight.
Let me end, as always, with stuff I like.
I'm doing now playing stuff I like, stuff I like that is now available, that is happening right now, because I know I always do this old stuff.
And the thing about old stuff, of course, is that it's been tried and tested.
You know, if it lasts for 200 years, it probably is pretty good.
You know, it probably has something to say to people.
But stuff that's on now is so relevant to what's happening in our lives and so revelatory of the actual world we're in that it also has this special power.
And that is why I love this show on HBO Silicon Valley.
It's hilarious.
It's basically about a bunch of young people starting a business.
You can't even understand.
If you're not a computer guy, you can't even understand what their business is.
It has something to do with the way you get music off the net.
I don't really understand what it is, but they're building a whole business about it.
And it is about this guy who goes out.
It's created by the people who created Beavis and Butthead and who worked on National Review.
So it has this antic sense of humor.
The characters are so precise, so well acted, a bunch of nerds trying to build what they hope will be a billion-dollar business.
It starts out with the lead, Thomas Middleditch, who's a Canadian actor who's just perfect as the lead nerd.
He's the guy who's running this company.
He comes up with this idea, and a big-time company offers him $10 million for it.
And another company offers him $250,000 for it, but he gets to keep the company.
If he takes the $10 million, he gets $10 million and he walks away.
He loses the company.
If he takes the quarter million, he still keeps the company, but he doesn't have as much money.
And it's really going to be a thing.
And he decides, of course, to take this lesser money and keep the company.
Whereupon he starts immediately succumbing to stress and throwing up and having night sweats and all this stuff because he's just this nervous little guy.
And he finally ends up going to the doctor.
And here is the Silicon Valley doctor giving him his experience.
You know, a while back, we had a guy in here in almost the exact same situation.
Take the money or keep the company.
What happened?
Well, a couple months later, he was brought into the ER with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I guess he really regretted not taking that money.
He shot himself because he turned down the money.
Yeah.
Or no, he took the money.
Or no.
No, he did not.
I don't, you know what?
I don't remember.
But whatever it was, he regretted it so much that he ended up shooting himself, and now he's blind.
Find?
Yeah, just FYI.
If you're ever going to shoot yourself, don't hold the gun up to your temple, okay?
Because that just basically took out both of his optic nerves and then, you know, half of his face.
Then his wife left him because, you know.
Yikes.
You know, he may have been a genius programmer, but not so much with human anatomy.
Or decision-making for that matter.
Great stuff.
It's a really good show.
It's about to start its third season, I think, next week.
And I think if you go on your on-demand, you can get the first two seasons.
I'm about halfway through the second season.
Really funny.
Silicon Valley, stuff I like that's happening now.
All right, stuff I'm not so sure I like.
The New York primary will be going on, and we will be back tomorrow with the results and our incisive analysis.