Ep. 113 skewers 2016’s election chaos, where Hillary Clinton’s victory speech mocks historical injustices before pivoting to fundraising, while Bernie Sanders parodies economic inequality with Tsarist critiques—yet Trump’s crass, self-promoting rant dismisses Lincoln and opponents alike. Host Andrew Clavin frames the race as 1968-level volatile, with Indiana and California primaries still undecided, exposing media overconfidence; Trump’s anti-PC appeal clashes with Clinton’s polarizing policies on immigration and climate, while a fictional "Friends of Abe" Hollywood group’s collapse hints at conservative infighting. If Trump wins the GOP nomination, Clavin warns it signals Reaganism’s death—replacing small-government ideals with liberal overreach—culminating in an election exposing systemic corruption beneath political theater. [Automatically generated summary]
Big wins for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump last night in the East, including the state of Pennsylvania where the American experiment began.
Hillary, having won the Democratic primary in the Keystone State, said in her victory speech, quote, it was here in this state that a group of racist white men set this nation on a course of slaveholding and stealing land from Indians, and I pledge to you tonight to reverse that trajectory until we're all once again naked savages ripping each other's hair off with stone knives.
She then began coughing uncontrollably until a bloody lump of pure corruption spilled out over her sharpened teeth, after which she went on to say, quote, I want to tell you here tonight whatever will cause you to give my foundation as much money as possible, and I mean that sincerely from the bottom of my heart, or not, if you'd rather I didn't.
Bernie Sanders in his concession speech said, I would like to congratulate Secretary Clinton even as I weep for the peasants freezing to death in the snowy fields outside of Moscow while the Tsar sits in his palace oblivious to their suffering.
Reporters asked Senator Sanders what he was talking about, then remembered who they were speaking to, and the question answered itself.
Meanwhile, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the ghosts of the Civil War dead gathered to weep for the fate of the union they fought and died to preserve, Donald Trump made his victory speech saying, quote, four score and seven years ago, and let me tell you folks, when it comes to scoring, I have scored many times, many, many times, and with some of the most beautiful women in the world, wives of very powerful men, frankly, because let me tell you, there is nothing wrong with my tiny hands, I guarantee it.
And I know some people are going to say this is not the sort of speech that ugly Abe Lincoln would have made.
I like to call him ugly Abe because just look at that face, it's a disaster.
They say he was a great president, but he was shot, and I prefer presidents who weren't shot.
He was sitting there in the theater watching a comedy or whatever, while the guy with the gun walked right up in back of him, ha ha ha, bang, what a loser, unquote.
Elsewhere in the state, the 240-year-old American Republic returned to Philadelphia saying she wanted to die at home.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Hey, that wasn't too depressing, was it?
I mean, it's like we're here now in the throbbing heart of darkness, as was predicted.
You know, people were teasing me on Twitter last night.
They were saying, oh, I can't wait to hear how Andrew Clavin's going to spin this and make it sound like a good thing.
But I haven't been spinning anything.
You know, I told you it's going to be like this.
And at the end of the heart of darkness, we're still not going to know who the Republican candidate is going to be.
And that is exactly right.
But that people were going to be telling you that it's over.
Then that's what we heard on TV last night.
It's all over.
You know, you have to remember one thing.
First of all, I've seen like a lot of stuff.
So the first election that I remember is 1968, okay?
That's the first election that I was really old enough to be cognizant of.
People died in that election.
The candidates were shot.
You know, Robert F. Kennedy didn't.
I shook hands with Robert F. Kennedy about, I don't know what it was, four weeks before he was killed.
Martin Luther King was killed.
There were actual riots, not make-believe Trump riots, or actual riots at the convention.
This is a really fascinating election, but come on, it's not the worst thing I've ever seen.
And I just don't like, see, I don't like this thing about people saying that they know what's going to happen before they know what's going to happen.
It's because people don't like suspense.
I've spent my life writing suspense novels.
People love suspense novels because they don't like real suspense.
They want to know what is going to happen.
And when you don't, you don't.
I mean, I've never even said, I've never even called myself never Trump because to be honest with you, I haven't thought about it yet because I don't think we know what's going on.
I have to tell you one thing before we're going to talk about, obviously we have to talk about the election.
We're also going to talk about the super secret Hollywood group, a group of Hollywood conservatives that's so super secret it's been in the news for the past three days and basically every paper everywhere.
And they've been saying things that just aren't true about it.
And I, of course, was a member of this organization, and so I will talk about that at the end.
But first, I do want to talk about this, but I have to tell you, I'm watching the commentary last night.
A friend of mine wrote to me yesterday, and I won't name him, but he's a guy I really respect and like, very smart guy.
I won't name him because I didn't get his permission, but he said he heard me complaining about the commentary on Fox News, which has now just become Trump News, and CNN, which has this stupid thing where they have two tables of commentators with like 15 guys, and each one of them says something more boring than the last guy, and they're just the Hillary state.
This guy said, watch MSNBC, right?
The famous far-left-wing arm of the left-wing and NBC.
So I turned it on last night.
It's the best election commentary I've heard so far.
I mean, this is Brian Williams, Rachel Maddow, okay, and Eugene Robinson, one of the most left-wing columnists and this very cute, adorable woman from the Bush administration, Nicole Wallace.
Do we have a picture of her?
She was, yeah, really good-looking dame who was in the Bush administration.
She was on the View for a while, and they fired her because she didn't know anything about celebrities, but very smart.
And to me, watching Maddow and Brian Williams, remember Brian Williams, the guy who bowed to Obama before we found out that he was making everything up?
You know, and Eugene Robinson, who I can barely read without my eyeballs catching fire.
It was like, you know that video game, Twisted Metal, where all the crazy gangsters and clowns get in cars and shoot each other up?
It was like watching the cast of Twisted Metal discuss politics.
But they were very intelligent, very smart, and except Rachel Maddow, who was not terrible, but she was the most skewed to the left.
They were pretty just telling you what they saw.
Rachel Maddow was the only one who said it's over.
Both nominations are over.
So, of course, you know, Ted Cruz is in Indiana.
He just blew town.
And, I mean, this was a Trump blowout.
It was a Hillary blah, too.
I mean, Bernie Sanders won Rhode Island, which is actually a mythical state.
There actually is no Rhode Island.
People, if you go there, there's Delaware, and then you just fall into this kind of blackness that Rhode Island is, somebody made Rhode Island up, but Bernie Sanders won it.
And, you know, and so Trump, it was a blah.
Ted Cruz just left town, went to Indiana, and here's Ted Cruz's explanation of why.
The media is going to say, hey, the race is over.
The media is going to say Donald Trump is the Republican nominee.
Now, if you find yourself wondering why the media is so eager to have Donald as the Republican nominee, you don't have to look any further than today's USA Today front page.
40% of GOP doubt they'd vote for Trump.
40%.
Now, I want you to think for a second, the network executives, are they Democrats or are they Republicans?
Every one of them are ready for Hillary.
And Donald Trump is the one man on earth Hillary Clinton can beat in a general election.
And so the media has told us the candidates in this race, the Republican and Democrat, they're both going to be New York liberals.
But I got good news for you tonight.
This campaign moves back to more favorable terrain.
So that is Ted Cruz's very plausible reason for why the press might say that the election is over because they think Trump will lose.
I like, by the way, the way he papers the back with all the homeschooled students who have, every one of those kids has memorized the Constitution.
All of which, by the way, you could see if you would subscribe to the podcast.
Then you get to not only hear it, but see it.
And also, I wish you'd do it because it's not very expensive and you get to be part of the show.
You can send in letters and we'll actually take your questions and maybe even do some video questions.
Anyway, is it over?
On the Democrat side, yes.
The Democrat side, it is over.
It is now, you know, it was always over, but now it's over, over.
Yesterday, as I said, Hillary lost the mythical state of Rhode Island, but she won all the real states.
And Bernie Sanders released his statement.
And listen to this statement.
Okay.
The people in every, this is Bernie Sanders, the people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be.
That's why we are in this race until the last vote is cast.
That is why this campaign is going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare for all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.
That's a concession speech.
That is basically saying he's lost, but he's going to go to the convention with as many delegates as he can because then he has the power to negotiate for the left-wing progressive platform that he wants because they want party unity and they don't want him standing against Hillary in the general.
I love those policies, by the way.
No fracking because we don't want cheap, clean energy and we want to continue to send our dollars to terrorists so they can kill us.
And breaking up Wall Street financial institutions who are funneling money into free enterprise and new businesses.
You know, it's great ideas and tuition, free tuition and a carbon tax.
Yeah, it's great.
It's like a complete disaster.
So at least someone in the Democrat Party is saying that at least they're going for the crook instead of the crazy man.
I wish we could say this.
I wish we had a crook that we could move forward.
In the world of Trump, Trump came out last night after his massive, I mean, it was a massive victory.
It was more than the polls say.
And that's why some of the commentators were kind of shell-shocked and thought it was worse.
It was not more than you heard here.
Here, I told you it was going to be a huge Trump blot.
This is where the future comes to announce itself before actually happening in the rest of the world.
I told you it was going to be a huge Trump blowout.
It was.
Trump came out and said he is the presumptive nominee.
It's over.
Kasich and Cruz should get out.
Well, of course he says that.
You know, that's what I would say.
He also said Bernie Sanders should run third party.
I mean, it's like, you know, what else?
Any other good ideas?
By the way, Trump is, as we speak, Trump is making his very presidential off-the-teleprompter foreign policy speech.
So I'll have to talk about that tomorrow if you're wondering why I'm not talking about that.
I think he's doing it while I'm talking.
And I hope you're listening to me instead because I make a lot more sense.
So now Trump, so now Hillary is the presumptive nominee.
Trump is pretending to be the presumptive nominee.
It's still down to Indiana and California where Trump may win.
He may win.
He blew Wisconsin so badly that people think that might happen again in Indiana and California, where he doesn't poll quite as well, but he's still ahead in the polls.
There were a lot of things that happened in Wisconsin that won't happen in Indiana and California.
Personally, my prediction, it's all going to come down to my vote in California.
You were talking, it's going to be like they're going to be sending me gifts.
You know, the women are going to show up at my door.
You know, the limousines are going to be coming.
It's all going to be about my vote in California.
That is what's going to happen.
So we got a preview of what the Trump-Hillary, a Trump-Hillary general election would be like.
And I have to tell you, even though it probably means the end of the Republic, it's going to be incredibly entertaining.
People ask why I'm always in a good mood.
It's because human corruption is one of the funniest things there is.
And it's always in such big supply.
We've always got a plenty of supply of human corruption.
And when you're watching politics, it's always there.
So it's very funny.
So first, Trump, play the first Trump quote, the first Trump cut.
Trump goes after Hillary.
Well, I think the only card she has is the woman's card.
She's got nothing else going.
And frankly, if Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5% of the vote.
The only thing she's got going is the woman's card.
And the beautiful thing is, women don't like her, okay?
And look how well I did with women tonight.
Okay.
Now, the wonderful thing about this is they cut, I'm watching this on MSNBC, and they cut back to Rachel Maddow, who, as I said, was perfectly charming and bright, but skewed left in her commentary, but not as far left as she is.
She just tried to get it under control.
She heard this and she said, Wow, that really, that's going to alienate women.
That is going to end.
Nicole Wallace turned to her and basically said, Haven't you figured out yet that the things we think are going to destroy Trump never do?
These things don't matter.
And it's true.
People are sick and tired of being told what they can and can't say.
They're sick and tired of being told that if you don't like the president and his skin happens to be brown, you're a racist.
If you don't agree with this president and you happen to notice that she's shrill and screeches and is a pain in the neck, you know, oh my gosh, what a, you know, that's you're a sexist.
Well, so what?
So you're a sexist.
So what?
You know, live with it.
That's what Trump has, and that's what's so appealing.
I'm not saying it's going to lead him to victory.
I'm just saying that those are not the things that are going to stop Donald Trump.
All right, so now Hillary strikes back.
This is the preview of the general election.
Hillary strikes back, play the first Hillary Clinton.
Now, the other day, Mr. Trump accused me of playing the quote woman card.
Well, if fighting for women's health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in.
Now, wait, wait.
This is, this is, I know, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, my God, that voice.
I think I've gone deaf.
Now, wait.
So the next morning, this morning, on Morning Joe, Trump sounding like he's absolutely exhausted.
He sounds like he was up last night.
He doesn't drink, right?
So he can't have been drinking, but maybe he was doing some doobies or something.
He sounds just exhausted.
He shows up on Morning Joe on the phone, and here's his reaction to that quote.
Well, I haven't quite recovered.
It's early in the morning from her shouting that message.
And I know a lot of people would say, you can't say that about a woman because, of course, a woman doesn't shout.
But the way she shouted that message was not, ooh.
I just, that's the way she said it.
And it's, I guess I'll have to get used to a lot of that over the next four or five months.
I gotta say, the guy has no more business in the Oval Office than I do, but that is really funny.
So, ooh, ooh, yeah.
Ooh, Her Shout Denies Substantive Jobs00:04:37
Because, I mean, it's great because we're all thinking it, right?
I mean, it's exactly.
I've deal me in.
I feel all right.
It's like having Elaine Stritch running for president.
The woman who played Alec Baldwin's mother on 30 Rock, you know.
It's like, if that's playing a woman's card, then Dale Me in.
It's like, ah, please.
So I love, I love Trump because, ooh, oh, oh.
This is going to be, if this does come down to Trump and Hillary, I got to say, it is going to be tremendous laughs, and then the Republic will be over.
But that's all right.
So now, here's the more substantive, if that's the word I want, the more substantive exchange that's a preview of the election to come.
The second Hillary clip, she comes up with her plans.
In this election, we will have to stand together and work hard to prevail against candidates on the other side who would threaten all those rights and pit Americans against each other.
They would make it harder to vote, not easier.
They would deny women the right to make our own reproductive health care decisions.
They would round up.
They would round up millions of hardworking immigrants and deport them.
They would demonize and discriminate against hardworking, terror-hating Muslim Americans who we need in the fight against radicalization.
And both of the top candidates in the Republican Party deny climate change even exists.
It's like every word out of her mouth is dishonest.
You know, nobody denies climate change exists.
We just don't think it's a terrible disaster.
You know, the immigrants that they're going to wind up are illegal immigrants.
You know, she always leaves that word out.
And, you know, the terror-hating Muslims and all this.
It's amazing.
The one that always gets me is deny women their choices and reproductive health care rights, because nobody ever anywhere is running on that platform.
All they're saying is stop killing the babies.
That's all they want.
You know, yesterday, I don't know, it was in the Daily Telegraph.
I don't know where it came from.
There was a video of human embryos being fertilized, sperm going into a human embryo and fertilizing it.
And when that happens, I had no idea of this.
I'd never heard of this.
There is an enormous flash of light.
There's this big, I mean, you watch it and your eyes fill.
You know, it's like you think, oh, no.
I mean, if I'm in Planned Parenthood and I see this thing, you know, I'm like, uh-uh.
I'm getting my CV ready.
You know, I was like, yeah, I want to, I was, I was, don't worry about what I was doing before.
I just want a different job now.
You know, I was like, yeah, I was killing me.
Don't even think about it.
And of course, you know, there's a scientific explanation that has to do with zinc, but you could literally focus in there and you could focus into a woman's womb and see Jesus planting life into, you know, that bobblehead Jesus who's giving the thumbs up.
You know, you could see him in there going, yay, hey, it's alive.
You know, like in Frankenstein, it's alive.
They still, they would still be like, well, it's not a person.
The other day, Hillary Clinton said an unborn person doesn't have constitutional rights.
And what do you think the left went after her for?
You know, they went after her for calling it a person.
You know, never mind.
It's not enough to deny him his rights.
You have to not even admit it's a person.
You saw this flash of light and you thought like, uh-oh, guy.
So you may want to reconsider.
All right, so now Trump answers her.
And this is the final cut of this, of Trump responding.
I call her crooked Hillary.
She's crooked.
She'll be a horrible president.
She knows nothing about job creation.
Her husband signed NAFTA, which destroyed this country economically, I will tell you.
You look at New York State, you look all over New England, you look at Pennsylvania.
NAFTA was a disaster.
Her husband signed it.
And it was a disaster for this country.
Hillary will be horrible, absolutely horrible on economic development.
She will be terrible on jobs.
She knows nothing about jobs except for jobs for herself.
And when it came to answering the phone, when it came to answering the phone at 3 o'clock in the morning, she was sleeping, okay?
She wasn't with Benghazi and all of the other problems.
You look at what she did with Syria.
You look at what she's done in so many different ways.
She will not be a good president.
She doesn't have the strength.
She doesn't have the stamina.
Okay, so that is what we're going to be hearing if this becomes a Trump-Hillary election.
This is what we're going to be hearing.
Basically, you know, personal attacks versus this crazed left-wing agenda that it's not anything that it sounds like.
Witnessing Reagan's End00:03:22
But the bigger story, and if, you know, I get accused all the time, every day they accuse me of bashing Trump.
I'm not bashing Trump.
I'm telling you what I think of Trump the same way.
I'm telling you what I think of everything else.
But William Galston, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, had an excellent, excellent column this morning explaining Donald Trump in a way that I really haven't seen elsewhere.
And he talks about how Donald Trump is destroying Reaganism.
He's the end of Reaganism.
And let me just read, I can't read a lot of it, but I'll read as much of it as I can.
He says, the minute-to-minute coverage of the 2016 presidential primaries threatens to obscure the larger story.
This is William Galston in today's Wall Street Journal.
While Senator Bernie Sanders is pressing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to move further and faster down the progressive road, Donald Trump is waging and winning the third major revolution in the Republican Party since World War II.
And then he talks about how Dwight Eisenhower came in and beat Robert Taft.
And when Eisenhower came in, he disappointed conservatives because he didn't repeal the New Deal.
He basically said the New Deal is here to stay and we're going to live with it.
And that is how you knew that FDR was a transformational president because the next president didn't come in and disassemble what he did.
Okay, so after that, there was a foreign policy consensus, basically.
Everybody agreed that we were going to have this kind of small welfare state and we were all internationalists against the communists.
We're going to fight the communists.
Then he says the Vietnam War destroyed the Cold War foreign policy consensus.
Stagflation did the same for the Keynesian economic consensus.
The rise of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, feminism, and a bevy of social issues broke the duopoly of silence that had largely kept these divisive issues off the public agenda.
With these new concerns, the stage was set for the Reagan Revolution, a remarkable fusion of supply-side economics, anti-Soviet internationalism, and social conservatism that framed American politics until Barack Obama's election.
Enter Donald Trump, who proposes to turn Reaganism on its head.
Ted Cruz is right.
Mr. Trump is no social conservative.
He does indeed espouse New York values, especially the Big Apple's relaxed attitudes on gay and transgender issues.
His pro-life sentiments are a day old and an inch deep, and his religious commitments are hard to discern.
That's putting it mildly.
Nor is Mr. Trump an internationalist.
He rejects U.S. alliances and commitments as unaffordable burdens.
He believes in America first.
In economics, Mr. Trump rejects current trade treaties as bad bargains struck by inept U.S. negotiators, and he paints immigration as an assault on American workers and society itself.
He doesn't appear to care about the budget deficit.
He rejects cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
And in a rare bow to Republican orthodoxy, he has proposed a deep tax cut, but it is hardly at the center of his agenda.
Few take it seriously.
In Reagan's first inaugural address, he declared that in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
That isn't Mr. Trump's view.
He opposes not big government, but rather stupid government, presenting himself as the cure for stupidity.
Nor is he what the conservative movement dubs a constitutionalist.
How could he be when he seems to believe that the U.S. government has at most one branch whose power he views even more expansively than does President Obama?
Friends of Abe: The Beginning00:05:32
Okay, so that is what we are witnessing.
We are witnessing the end of the Reagan Revolution and Reagan's policies.
And the unfortunate thing is we're witnessing it would be one thing for the Reagan Revolution to end in a new vision of conservatism, but Trump is not a conservative.
Trump is a big government liberal who will bring that to the office.
If you're wondering why people like me stand so hard against him, it's not just the fact that he's a bully and a bad guy and corrupt in his business dealings.
It's also because of the fact he is not a conservative.
And people say, well, would you want Hillary Clinton to be president?
As I keep saying, just because there are two evils doesn't mean there is a lesser of two evils.
All right, so we're here in the heart of darkness.
I have to talk about the Friends of Abe.
Okay, Friends of Abe is a super secret, never-to-be-mentioned, never-to-be-named Hollywood organization of Hollywood Republicans.
Now that I've told you about it, I have to come to your house and kill you.
But at this point, it's ridiculous because it's just been in, I've never spoken about it before.
I've never actually said the words in public before, Friends of Abe, but I have to, you know, I got involved in Friends of Abe when I first met Andrew Breitbart.
I met Andrew Breitbart on the air.
He interviewed me.
He was subbing for a radio host.
And I had written a piece about David Mammet, the playwright, becoming a conservative.
And Andrew was very, very convinced, as I am very convinced, that culture is more important than politics, that these elections that we're fighting are the end result of the culture that has been fed into us through the TV, through just the way people live, and through the arts.
And so when I wrote about David Mammet, he was very excited.
He asked me on the show, and we started talking, and I frequently compared that first conversation to, which went on both on air and off the air during the commercials.
I frequently compare it to two college roommates smoking dope late at night and suddenly realizing that they agree on everything.
We were going like, yeah, man, yeah, that's exactly what I think.
Wow.
And of course, Andrew was the opposite.
Andrew was a multitasker, which would be the, he had attention deficit disorder, as he would have said.
I have the opposite of attention deficit disorder.
When I'm doing one thing, that is all I am doing.
I cannot focus on anything else.
When I work, I turn off my email, I turn off my phone, I don't answer the phone, I'm just very focused.
So he, in the middle of this interview, so I'm on radio, which for me is an experience because I'm being interviewed and I'm trying to be some kind of make some kind of sense.
He starts texting me at the same time.
So while I'm talking on the radio, I'm trying to answer Andrew's text.
And he's asking me these complex questions about David Mammet and his place in the culture.
He's texting me at the same time.
Have you met anybody in Friends of Abe?
And I said, I'd never heard of it.
And he said, oh, you have to get in Friends of Abe.
It's a super secret organization of Hollywood liberals.
So he started Hollywood Conservatives, sorry, which were rare.
And it was secret because nobody wanted to lose his job.
Some of these people were very famous, but a lot of them were just the guys who fixed the lights and worked the cameras and they didn't want to get fired if people found out they were conservatives, which they would have been.
So we organized this meeting and there would be meetings and there would be parties and things like this.
It was just a fellowship.
That's all it was.
But it started to get very big.
It started to get kind of overwhelming.
And finally, it became kind of an official organization.
And if you wanted to, you didn't have to, but you could pay dues.
And it was a 501c3 with a, that was in the front page of the New York Times.
I remember laughing at this super secret organization on the front page of the New York Times, which actually is not really in public since nobody reads the Times anymore.
So, you know, it got very big.
But at the same time, it never really, there was no way to raise any money for it because you couldn't go and say, oh, here are the members of the organization.
They're so famous.
Because nobody wanted to be revealed.
When Breitbart started Big Hollywood, his first big site, he asked me to write what I think was the lead-off piece for Big Hollywood.
And I wrote this piece about how we conservatives in Hollywood would not be silenced.
And as I'm writing the piece, I kind of worked up to this final peroration where I said, you know, you think we're afraid.
Well, we're not afraid.
And I started naming all the big Hollywood conservatives.
I said, this one's not afraid, and that one's not afraid, and this one's not.
And I sent it off to Breitbart two minutes later, 120 seconds later, my phone rings.
I pick it up, it's Andrew.
And Breitbart says, you have to change the ending.
And I said, why?
He said, you can't name those people.
They're afraid.
Because this is really, it's our livelihood out here.
This is, you know, what, you know, entertainment is what we do for a living.
And if you're going to lose your job because you're a conservative, you want to protect that.
So that's what this organization was about.
This week, I think it was this week, the organization, it didn't fold exactly.
It simply went back to being what it was, a kind of casual fellowship of people who would gather together every now and again, send out a letter, and gather, because there wasn't anybody to run it.
There wasn't a bureaucracy that we could afford to have that you needed to take it to the next level.
And it really was a question of whether it was going to get bigger or go back the way it was.
And they just decided to send it back the way it was.
Everybody was busy.
Now, we know a lot about this because the Daily Wire is run by Jeremy Boring, who also was the executive director of this organization, as he has said on the air, so I'm not giving anything away.
So we know a lot about it.
We're at the sort of the center of this thing.
And I pick up the paper and The Guardian, it started with The Guardian, the British socialist paper, saying that the organization had fallen apart because we're all fighting over Donald Trump.
This is 100% untrue.
And they quote Lionel Chetwin, a very big producer out here, one of the founding members of FOA.
Civil War in Slow Motion00:03:18
They quote him.
They have a quote of him saying, this is a civil war in slow motion.
Donald Trump has caused a civil war in slow motion.
That quote is taken entirely out of context.
Lionel was talking about the entire country.
He was saying the entire Republican Party, which is certainly true.
Donald Trump has caused a civil war in slow motion.
Had nothing to do with the folding of FOA.
It had nothing to do with our cutting back.
It was purely an administrative decision, really.
A question of how much time was going to go into it.
Anyway, in the last two weeks, I've lost PJTV and FOA, so I'm just poisoned.
Whatever organization I touch dies beneath my feet.
But I think these things are indicative of the changes that are going place and taking place in conservatism in general and in this movement that I was one of the first people in to sort of change the culture, to make the culture speak for us, because it's going to have to in these years that are up ahead.
If this is a Trump-Hillary election, then we're not going to have a conservative.
We know for sure we're not going to have a conservative in the White House.
The conservatives are going to have to take to the culture just like the left did.
The left took to the universities, they took to the media, they took to show business, they took them over it so that only their voices are now heard.
We have got to change that, and that's what we're going to be working on if this election turns out the way it looks like right this minute.
But we don't know whether that will happen.
Stuff I like.
I've been talking about huge classic novels that maybe you haven't read, but you should have.
I talked about War and Peace yesterday, which has become almost a byword for huge classic novels that nobody has read.
Great, great novel.
The Count of Monte Cristo, the most entertaining.
I seriously think it made, if I had to at gunpoint, pick the most entertaining novel I ever read, The Count of Monte Cristo, and right up there beside it is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
One of the reasons I love Charles Dickens so much is critics hate him because he's so great and so entertaining.
And critics hate entertaining writers.
They really do, serious critics.
They'll talk about, what was his book?
I think it was Hard Times, they like to praise because it's his one boring book.
It's the only boring book he ever wrote.
So the critics are saying, well, hard times isn't bad.
Dickens was a writer of the first, very first water.
I mean, up there with Shakespeare, up there with Tolstoy and all those great writers.
He was as great a prose writer who has ever lived, as great a storyteller who has ever lived.
David Copperfield is his most personal novel, really the story of his own rise from a kid who was working as a little boy in a blacking factory to becoming a famous novelist.
And that's the story of David Copperfield, D.C. David Copperfield's initials are CD.
Charles Dickens' initials turned backwards.
It is so entertaining.
It is one of the very, very few books, very few books.
I can count them on half the fingers of one hand that ever made me actually cry.
I actually had to put down the book and just bury my face in my hands.
It is such a moving, terrific story.
Excellent story.
David Copper People by Charles Dickens.
Read it before tomorrow and then come back tomorrow and we'll discuss Donald Trump's foreign policy speech.
Whatever he said, I'm sure it's going to be great.
It's going to be great.
It's going to be the best deals with the best people and it's going to be the best foreign policy ever.