Ep. 190 pits NeverTrump conservatives—who fear Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court picks over Trump’s authoritarian risks—against NeverHillary backers, who see her as a bigger threat despite Trump’s policy contradictions. The episode critiques Hollywood’s secular erasure of faith in films like Sully, where divine intervention is omitted, and contrasts it with cultural battles over transgender representation and Trump’s pivot to entitlement politics. Ultimately, it questions whether ideological purity or disruption defines modern conservatism. [Automatically generated summary]
Today, a report from Hollywood, where people who get paid too much money to pretend to be someone they're not pretend to know about things they don't in order to alienate an audience they despise in the hopes of being paid too much money to pretend to be someone they're not to an audience they despise.
That's Showbiz.
Our story today is about Nick Adams of GLAAD.
GLAAD, G-L-A-A-D, used to stand for Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation until GLAD announced it was broadening its mission to include transgender people and issued a statement saying GLAAD would no longer stand for anything but would just be a series of random letters that accidentally sounds like being happy, but isn't.
Nick Adams of GLAD's Transgender Media Program is protesting.
What is he protesting?
He's protesting the fact that Hollywood movies about transgender women too often use straight male actors who dress up as women to portray men who dress up as women.
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Andrew Andrew, you sly devil.
How is it a man as physically alluring as yourself could harbor the brilliant satirical intelligence that concocts these overblown fantasies of leftist insanity in order to bring a little humor and light into our humdrum ordinary lives?
But no, while it's true I am terribly attractive, I am not actually making this up.
In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, Nick Adams of Random Letters Spelling Glad writes, quote, in spite of the critical and commercial success of projects that put trans people front and center, Hollywood is having a very difficult time letting go of the idea that putting a male actor in a dress, wig, and makeup is an accurate portrayal of a transgender woman, unquote.
How true.
In what moral universe could it possibly be right to hire actors to portray people different than themselves?
Do you think Matt Damon would have been hired to play Jason Bourne if he weren't really an amnesiac super assassin seeking to take down the CIA?
Of course not.
That would be like hiring Sean Penn to play an intelligent man of integrity.
The audience simply wouldn't buy it.
In fact, it was only Sean Penn's support of Hugo Chavez that gave Penn the credibility to play a retarded man in I Am Sam.
But really, when you think about it, Nick Adams of Random Letters Spelling Glad is making a very serious point.
Your average transgender woman isn't just some straight male actor wearing a dress, wig, and makeup.
He's probably never acted a day in his life.
He may not even be straight.
After all, what straight man would walk around in a dress, wig, and makeup?
The whole idea is absurd.
Hollywood has got to realize that when a man declares he's a woman, his opinion of himself has to be respected.
After all, if he declared he was Napoleon, we'd let him rule France, wouldn't we?
Of course we would.
It'd have to be better than whoever's doing it now.
And that's today's report from Hollywood, where relevance is just a word that means irrelevance.
Tricker warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm glad somebody has time on his hands to protest things that really mean nothing to anybody.
All right, boy, you know, there's a poem, I can't remember which poem it is, that has the line in it, where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.
And I think it was written in, I think, the 19th century, but he was describing Los Angeles because this place is beautiful.
The weather today is unbelievably great.
The traffic is so jammed up.
We have to have to give a big hand to Taylor Payne, our makeup lady who did my makeup on the fly.
So if I look like the Joker from one of the Dark Knight movies, that's why.
But no, I look great, right?
She did a great job.
Good job.
Trump's Child Care Plan00:14:43
All right, it's Mailbag Day.
Hooray!
And we're going to try something.
We're going to try something completely new today.
People may get hurt doing this.
We're going to try, we're going to take the questions that you sent in earlier.
But if you want, if you're a subscriber, you can actually send in questions while I'm talking and live chat on the, on the day, you know, because if you're a subscriber, you can watch this entire show on the Daily Wire site all the way through.
If you're not, you can see 15 minutes on Facebook or YouTube, and then we just cut you off as if we never cared about you in the first place and throw you out into the darkness, or you can come to the Daily Wire and hear the rest of the show or hear it on SoundCloud or iTunes.
until you finally pry your fingers off that lousy eight bucks a month and subscribe to see the whole thing.
And then you can actually be in the mailbag and we'll answer your questions.
Also, final week to pre-order my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, and you can send it in for a signature sticker by sending your receipt to acclaim at DailyWire.com.
And I should warn you, by the way, that next week I will be gone two days because I have to go and promote the book on TV.
So Monday and Tuesday, it's going to be a long, Clavenless weekend.
I know it's going to be tough.
All right.
So yesterday, our friend Donald Trump, who I think he's running for something, right?
He's not just a businessman.
Yeah, he's actually running for president as a Republican.
But yesterday he unveiled his child care plan.
He said his daughter, Ivanka, came to him and said, Daddy, daddy, you have to have a child care plan.
And there's nothing I like better than a strong feminist woman shouting, daddy, daddy.
In fact, I think I have a sexual fantasy like that, but I can't remember now.
Maybe that's too much information.
But she said, daddy, daddy, you have to have a child care plan.
So he unleashed a child care plan.
And let's hear just a little bit of what he had to say.
These solutions must update laws passed more than a half a century ago where most women were still not in the labor force.
All stone or even close.
Today, nearly two in three mothers with young children have jobs.
For many families in our country, child care is now the single largest expense.
Who would take that even more so than housing?
Yeah, very little meaningful policy work has been done in this area.
And my opponent has no child care plan.
She never will.
And if it ever evolves into a plan, it'll never get done anyway.
All talk, no action.
All right, now, first of all, just in the interest of fairness, that's actually not true.
Hillary Clinton has had a child care plan up.
Even before she was running, she had a child care plan up.
I mean, a Democrat without a child care plan is like a day without sunshine.
You know, Democrats have a child care plan.
They walk around with it in their wallet like teenagers with a condom.
They have their child care plan.
And hers is, you know, of course, even more elaborate than Trump's.
But Trump is pretty elaborate.
He's going to rewrite the tax code, allowing working parents to deduct from their income taxes for child care expenses for up to four children, as well as for elderly dependents.
There's an establishment of a dependent care savings account created to aid families to set aside money to foster their children's development and offset elder care.
And the third part of the plan will address the federal regulations that currently discourage informal child care, such as a mom watching her own kids.
The fourth part is really the big one.
It adds incentives for employers.
I'm sorry, the fourth part adds incentive for employers to provide childcare at the workplace.
And it has the federal government is essentially guaranteeing for the first time six weeks of paid maternity leave.
And I believe Hillary Clinton's plan is 12 weeks for everybody to leave.
I think if you have a baby, your entire staff just disappears and takes care of this.
Now, the important thing about that, obviously Trump has to do this.
He is polling very badly among women because he offends them, cheats on them, and treats them like garbage.
And somehow, some of them don't like that.
I was always told that that's what they wanted, but that, no, no, it turns out they won't vote for you if you do that.
And so he's rolled out this thing, and this is supposed to appeal to women and get him and make people also think, I mean, partly it's because he's a Democrat.
He's a lifelong Democrat, and he's a liberal, and so this is what he's applying.
And Charles Krauthammer said it best on the panel yesterday.
This was his reaction to the plan.
Trump himself is the one who brings up the deficit and the debt all the time as a sign of our decline, a sign of having government out of control and having incompetence in government.
Look, I think this raises the question of how many Democratic parties does the country need.
We already have one.
And I thought during the primary season, the argument for Trump was he was a guy who would stand up to the Washington Republican, sold-out establishment that refused to stand up to Barack Obama on higher spending, refused to stand up to him on entitlements, refused to stand up to him on executive actions.
And therefore, we needed an outsider, a disruptor named Donald Trump, who would not do this.
What he is proposing is to out Democrats the Democrats.
This is an enormous new entitlement.
It will blow the debt.
And when he says the mandate, he's going to mandate from Washington.
Isn't that the one thing that Republicans all agree upon of the government stepping in and telling private industry what to do?
He says that will be paid for by taking out waste, fraud, and abuse from the unemployment insurance system.
If you believe that, you will believe anything.
Okay.
So now this is what makes the Never Trumpers, like our friend Ben, this is what makes Never Trumpers crazy.
It's not so much that Trump is throwing in this Democrat plan, because a lot of Republicans do that, W-through and that prescription medicine plan and all this.
It's that people are so devoted, so many formerly conservative voices are so devoted to Donald Trump that they are signing on to whatever it is he does.
So Laura Ingram, a conservative voice for many, many years, Sean Hannity, conservative voice for many, many years, who were tweeting when Bernie Sanders was running, Laura Ingram was tweeting, oh, she's going to give everybody free childcare.
It's going to be free, free.
She was making fun of him.
Now suddenly she's kind of judiciously saying, well, we'll have to see where this is going to be paid for.
It's not going to be paid for.
First of all, it's not going to be enacted if the Congress remains Republican, but it's not going to be paid for because there's just no way to pay for these entitlements.
And the basic, look, the basic principle of conservatism, the basic problem conservatism has with all these entitlement programs is not that we're heartless.
It's not that we don't care about working families and all this stuff.
It's that basically when you go to work every day and somebody gives you a check for the money for the work you did, they are paying you for your time.
That is time taken out of your life that you put into working that you get money in return for.
For the government, the idea of that is now you have transformed your time into money.
You can now spend that money and invest that money as you see fit.
That is the very nature of your freedom.
You know, freedom actually has a lot less to do with who you sleep with than how you spend your money and what you think and what you say.
And those are always the things that the government is trying to take away from you.
The government doesn't care who you sleep with.
That causes no problem for them whatsoever.
They care what you say and they care how you spend your money.
Conservatives simply believe that if you earn the money, it's yours and the government has a right to take it away from you to pay for the common defense, maybe to pay for a couple of roads here and there.
I'm not so sure about that.
But not to give it to somebody else.
Not to say, oh, well, you know, you want to use your money to pay Giuseppe to cook you pasta, but no, you can't do that.
We want to use your money to pay someone else to take care of someone else's child.
It's just a basic, basic, conservative principle that the government does not have the right to do that, that it's not in the Constitution, so the federal government doesn't have the right to do it.
Whether the state governments do is a whole other question, and certainly whether independent entities who want to create charities to do it, obviously, that is the best conservative idea.
Because remember, and the reason Republicans think this, the reason conservatives think this, sorry, the reason conservatives think this, is the government is never selling.
It's always buying.
It is never giving you freedom.
It is always taking power.
This is true whether you're gay or whether you're black, and they're saying to you, we're giving you the power through the Supreme Court, we're giving you the power to marry.
They're not.
They're taking away from you the power to decide and giving it to five guys in Washington who weren't elected by anybody, who suddenly are making laws for the country, which is completely unconstitutional.
They're always taking power.
They're never giving freedom.
Never.
So anything that the federal government does is meant to expand the federal government and it does.
The intentions may be good.
Some people believe, oh, you know, I'm really helping out.
I get it.
But that's the road to hell.
So what the Never Trumpers are saying, and what the Never Trump Trumpers problem is, is that this is taking the conservative movement and moving it to the left.
This is taking our Sean Hannity's and our Laura Ingrams and our Dennis Prager's and taking them out of the right and putting them to the left as they follow Trump down this rabbit hole, which is going to continue to get bigger all the time because this is who Trump is.
You know, Trump is following his nature.
So what they are saying is it might even be better if Hillary, if we had to endure the admittedly terrible presidency of Hillary Clinton while we rebuild a conservative movement.
And remember, movements thrive when they have an enemy.
So you have Hillary Clinton in office, people gathering around, what's wrong with what she's doing.
When Hillary Clinton says, I'm going to give you child care, suddenly Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram are going to rediscover what it is they oppose about health, about childcare, and they're going to go after her.
So that's the idea that the Never Trumpers are saying it's going to be easier to rebuild the conservative movement with a Hillary in office, no matter how bad she is, than with Trump who's going to not only take the country to the left, but he's going to take the conservative movement with it.
And that's what the Never Trumpers are saying.
And I will tell you what I think in just a minute.
But first, I have to say goodbye to everybody on Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to The Daily Wire and hear the rest and subscribe, darn you.
Okay, on the other side, we have the never-Hillaries, and their answer is easy.
Hillary is dreadful.
Hillary is the worst.
We hate Hillary.
Hillary's going to take away our guns.
She's going to appoint a Supreme Court justice who will overturn Heller, which says that the right to bear arms is an individual right.
Very, very important decision.
It's what the Supreme Court has been saying for 200 and some odd years.
But it could change tomorrow because the left has absolutely no loyalty to the Constitution, no loyalty to our traditions, and no loyalty to your freedom, which is why you're allowed to have guns.
You know, why you should be able to have guns is to defend your freedom.
So what they are saying, the Never Hillary people, is the damage she will do is so bad that no matter how bad Trump is, he won't be as bad.
And they are thinking about the country, not the conservative movement.
The conservative people are thinking about the country too.
They're just thinking the only salvation for the country is the conservative movement.
Now, I have to be honest.
First of all, my dislike for Trump does not have to do with his programs.
I already know he's a liberal.
I already have said a gazillion times that I've lost this election.
Nobody who gets elected is going to make for smaller government and more personal freedom.
Ain't going to happen.
That candidate isn't running.
And by the way, don't tell me, well, it's scary, you know, or Mel this or Bob this.
You know, there are only two candidates who have a possibility of winning.
Hillary, the late Hillary Clinton, who will be stuffed and will be up in the attic of the White House going, yes, Norman, we have to pass another law.
as Tim Kaine runs back and forth in a wig, and Donald Trump, who is essentially a leftist.
And, you know, so my dislike of Trump is not about his policies.
It really isn't.
It's about him personally.
I feel he's a dishonest guy.
I feel he's a corrupt guy.
I feel nothing he says means anything.
Nothing he says attaches to anything.
And I do feel that he has this strain of strongman fascism in him.
Not just I alone can solve, but if somebody comes in here with a tomato, beat the crap out of him, all that stuff.
You know, even though I don't believe at all he's an alt-writer, I don't believe the alt-right is that big a deal.
I believe they see something in him that they recognize, and I don't like it.
I don't like that way of being.
I'm a George Washington guy.
Give me the guy who can be a strong executive while obeying the Constitution, which Donald Trump has never read.
However, I will say this.
I do believe, I've told you that somewhere in my heart, I feel like I'm rooting for Trump to win.
And the reason for that has a lot to do with the establishment, the media, the government that won't listen to people.
Even the Wall Street Journal, where I love many of the writers, where I feel that they have not been listening to the complaints and the pains of the people, I would like to see those people get it stuck to them.
Donald Trump would stick it to them.
But it's also more than this.
And this is a point that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundent made in a USA Today column.
It's also that I feel that the establishment power is in place to oppose Trump.
The civil service, the IRS, which is now just a tool of the Democrats, the Justice Department, a tool of the Democrats.
All these bureaucrats, these nameless, faceless bureaucrats who aren't going to lose their jobs are there to oppose Donald Trump, plus a Republican Congress which will put a break on him.
I don't think they're going to roll over for Donald Trump.
I don't think they're going to give him whatever.
They may give him a lot in the first six months, but after that, they're going to start questioning him.
They're going to start looking to their constituency.
They're going to start doing what it is that a Congress does.
With Hillary, with Trump, I think in both cases, the checks and balances will work better with him.
I've thought this over a lot because there's a lot of high-pitched talk in the political commentating world.
You know, comparing Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, comparing Hillary to Hitler and all this stuff.
I don't believe either of these people is Hitler.
You have to work very hard to construct a society that produces a Hitler.
The Germans and the Europeans put a lot into it.
And congratulations, they finally got their guy to destroy them.
I don't think these guys are that.
I think that we will survive both a Trump presidency and a Hillary Clinton presidency.
I think there is a small chance, a small chance, a Trump presidency will be better, especially on the side of the Supreme Court.
Extracting God's Story00:13:39
And that's kind of where my heart lies.
I'm not enthusiastic about either of these people, but I'm not a never-Trumper.
And when he does stuff like this, by the way, it's politics to me.
To me, he puts forward this thing that people want this.
I've been yelling about the fact that the conservatives have not come up with an agenda that speaks to the out-of-work white working class people who are afraid in these economies.
And now we're paying the price for that as well.
All right, so that's where I stand.
And now, the mailbag.
And I'm going to try and do this thing with it.
If you're on there, I'm looking.
I see the chat and I see my own face.
Oh, my God.
But let me first go to the questions that were sent in.
This one is from Thomas.
As crappy as things are in our political system, you always seem to take things with a smile and a laugh.
That is true.
How?
That's a good question.
I know God is sovereign over all of this, but the more politics I know, the sadder I get.
Well, don't guess that.
That's a very personal question.
I'll give you a personal answer.
There are two things.
One is this.
People are always making this joke, and I get this a lot, and it's very funny, that they listen to Ben to be depressed, and then they listen to me to cheer themselves up.
And if I'm out of town, and they just listen to Ben, they get suicidal.
And if Ben's out of town, they just listen to me.
They're too happy.
And the thing is that that implies that I don't have a realistic sense of life.
And that is not true.
In fact, one of the reasons I am, I will admit it, I confess it freely, I am a joyful person.
And that has to do with two things.
One of them is I have a tragic sensibility.
I look at life as a very short, messy affair full of very corrupt human beings whom I love, many of whom I love.
And I know that freedom dies.
I know that nations die.
I know that people die.
And so every day that I'm here and my country's here and my freedom is here, good day.
I'm happy.
I get it.
I get it.
It's as if so many pessimists sound to me like you go to a doctor and maybe you're 50 and the doctor says, look, you're dying.
And you say, how long have I got?
And he says, well, maybe 30 or 40 years.
Well, that's true, but I mean, that is not a sufficiently tragic outlook of life.
Of course you're dying.
Of course the country's falling apart.
Of course we're going to hell in a handbasket.
That's the way it is.
It always is, but not today.
And so that's part of it.
The other part is the secret of life.
So I'll give you the secret.
I tell you, if you write in and ask questions, I will give you the secret of life.
The secret of life is simply this.
All joy comes from love.
The price of love is grief.
Once you understand that simple math, you can live a wonderfully joyful life even in times of grief.
Not only does all joy come from love, but the more important, the more valuable, the more worthwhile the thing you love is, the more joy you get.
Very simple.
I love the NFL.
I love football.
That's not very, doesn't have a lot of value.
It doesn't have a lot of worth.
I get a little joy from it.
I get a couple hours of joy on a Sunday.
That's terrific.
I love my wife.
She has tremendous value.
That gives me tremendous worth through tremendous joy.
I love God.
God has all value.
That gives me tremendous joy, even in times of terrible grief.
And what I mean by joy is not happiness.
I don't mean smiley-faced stupidity like some televangelist or something like that.
What I mean is even in grief and even in sorrow, I feel a sense that this is life and this is worthwhile.
This is a worthwhile thing.
It makes you love life.
If you love God, you end up loving life.
And I think that that's where your joy comes from.
That's the answer to your question.
Cultivate a tragic view of life and love.
Let yourself love the things that are worthwhile.
All right, from Mike, in light of your new book coming out, I'm curious, this is the great good thing.
I take a moment to plug my great good thing, a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
It's getting such good reactions.
I really hope you'll take a look at it.
In light of your new book coming out, I'm curious how the Jewish community in general has responded to your faith in Christ.
Have you been ostracized or ridiculed much?
Do you have any thoughts on how evangelical Christians can distance themselves from some of the ways that Christians have historically treated Jews in the past?
Well, first of all, one of my favorite chapters in this book is a chapter called This Thing of Darkness, which is from a Shakespeare line, This Thing of Darkness, I Acknowledge Mine.
And it's about anti-Semitism in the Christian world.
And I had to deal with this a lot when I realized that I was becoming a Christian.
I didn't want anyone to think that I was turning against the Jews or was buying into this anti-Semitism that has sometimes been enclosed within Christianity, even though it's not Christian itself.
And so you have to kind of look at it.
It's a complex chapter.
I mean, I think it says what it says very clearly, but it's hard for me to say it here.
So you have to look at that chapter called This Thing of Darkness.
You know, the reaction from Jews has been twofold.
Haven't gotten any attacks at all.
The reaction from Jews has either been incredibly generous, like from Ben Shapiro and some other people who read it and say, gee, you know, we're sorry we lost you, but, and they don't, they think I'm wrong, they think I've made a mistake, but they can see how it happened.
I'm very careful to describe why I was alienated from Judaism from my earliest days.
So I, you know, and people who say I never gave Judaism a chance, there's a lot of, there's truth to that.
I never did give Judaism a chance because I was raised in a godless Judaism that meant nothing to me.
So they have a point.
You can read the book like that, and Ben and others have been very generous about it.
Then I get people who are trying to convince me, and they're very harsh, but they're not unkind.
They're just like, you idiot, you missed the point, and here it is.
And if you read this book, if you'll only read this book and only read that book, you'll then see the light.
I have read it already, believe me.
Trust me, I've read it already.
And it didn't convince me.
Writing this book, one of the things that I was worried about in writing The Great Good Thing was, gee, I'm going to follow the logic of my conversion.
What if I find out it's all wrong?
Because by then I'd been a Christian for 10 years.
But I took the shot, I took the chance, and it actually all made sense.
And it was very, very reaffirming.
All right.
I'm not seeing any questions on this, which may be my incompetence.
It probably is my incompetence.
So I'm going to go back to the questions that were sent in before.
All right.
From Zane, you often say that I knew this wasn't going to work, but at least no one's been killed yet, right?
I don't think anyone's been hurt.
You often say the conservatives need to take back the culture, but you also talk about how our culture of visual media is more superficial than cultures of literary media are.
Conservatism is rooted in spiritual depth and moral thoughtfulness.
How do we take back the culture if the very form of our media undermines our message?
You know, that's a really good question, a really intelligent question.
And it is true that you can sell, it's harder to sell ideas visually, but stories are stories, and stories can be told visually.
And during the Middle Ages, the paintings on church walls were the stories that conveyed a very deep theology.
And movies can be very deep and very intelligent.
It's just simply that the stories aren't being told.
I mean, when I have gone in and pitched movies where you tell the story to a producer hoping he will hire you to write the movie, and you get to the end, and maybe you made the government the bad guy, maybe you made a Democrat the bad guy.
And the producer will say to you, Could you make the government, could you make the bad guy a Republican?
Could you make the bad guy the military?
I was once, almost physically thrown out of an office when I said, no, I'm not making that.
You know, we had just invaded Afghanistan.
I said, no, I'm not making the bad guy the military.
This is no time to demonize the military in movies.
It's not like I think the military is always right.
It's just that I thought this is a time for patriotism, time to support the military.
Don't do it.
This is one of the things I think was one of the most shameful incidences in Hollywood.
So look, here are the stories that don't get told.
The story of the brave oil man who battles environmentalists so that people in his neighborhood can have a job.
I tell that, and people laugh because they always know that the environmentalists in a movie are the good guys, right?
But you could tell that story.
That's a true story.
That's a true story.
You can tell that story.
You never hear the story about the guy who tries to cut down a tree on his yard and the government shows up and makes him pay.
And so the guy is forced to haul up with his weapons and fend the government off.
That's a great script.
I could write that script tomorrow.
I just couldn't sell it.
It is not that the stories aren't there to be told.
It's that no one is telling them.
And it is that the overwhelming atmosphere of Hollywood and of New York are so left-wing that they don't even imagine these stories.
They don't even know.
You know, let me give you an example.
Let's move into another part.
I went and saw Sully over the weekend.
And Sully is made by Clinton Eastwood.
Obviously, I love Clint personally for both his art and I love his philosophy.
He made my novel True Crime into a movie, so I'm greatly indebted to him.
I think he's a great director.
I feel like Eastwood is as good as the script he gets.
He doesn't develop scripts much.
He shoots the script, which I think is an incredibly mature and intelligent thing to do, but sometimes it means some movies of his movies are better than others, like any director.
Sully is, if you looked at Sully and you thought, wait, this guy landed a plane in the Hudson River and saved everybody, where's the drama?
The guy's just, that's the problem with the movie.
There's no drama.
So they have scenes like this one where the National Safety Board questions him about his decision.
Here's Tom Hanks as Sully answering the board.
Today we begin with our Operation and Human Performance investigation on the crash of U.S. Airways Flight 1549.
Water landing.
Captain?
This was not a crash and it wasn't a ditching.
We knew what we were trying to execute here.
It was not a crash.
It was a forced water landing.
Why didn't you attempt to return to LaGuardia?
There simply was not enough altitude.
The Hudson was the only place that was long enough and smooth enough and wide enough to even attempt to land the airplane safely.
Air Traffic testified that you stated you were returning to LaGuardia, but you did not.
I realized I couldn't make it back, and it would have eliminated all the other options.
Returning to LaGuardia would have been a mistake.
Okay, well, let's get into how you calculated all those parameters.
There was no time for calculating.
I had to rely on my experience of managing the altitude and speed of thousands of flights over four decades.
You're saying you didn't do anything?
I eyeballed it.
You eyeballed.
Yes.
So the NESB is protesting that they're made to look like villains, and they're right.
You know, that's their job, to find out what went wrong, what happened.
And, you know, he obviously did a great thing, and they make them look like mustache-twirling villains, you know, like they want to catch him out.
They have these scenes of him talking to his wife that are played as if there's some marital crisis when there obviously is no marital crisis.
There's no drama.
You know, that's the problem with it.
But it is, the crash scenes are great.
The middle part of it, 45 minutes or so, which is just the scene where he brings the plane down, is terrific.
So, you know, Clint remains a great director, and so it's got all that going on.
My problem with it is this.
This was called the miracle on the Hudson.
I mean, and it was a miracle.
There's no question about it.
I mean, no matter how good that pilot was, if like angels weren't under those wings, the guy dies and everybody dies.
There's no God in the movie.
And when I say this, I'm not preaching.
I'm not telling people that they have to put God into movies.
I'm just saying that the God has been extracted from the movie.
God has been taken out of the movie.
Nobody prays when this plane goes down.
One person prays when this plane goes down.
Nobody thanks God.
Nobody is like, goes, you know, there's nothing, there's no, instead of the miracle on the Hudson, it's just the incredible competence on the Hudson, you know.
And you have to make that effort.
You have to make an effort to extract God from the story.
I'm not talking about the angels and miracles and all this.
I'm talking about people's gratitude.
I'm talking about people's prayers.
People pray.
It reminded me of the film United 93, which was made by Greenglass, this incredible leftist.
The famous moment in this was when the hero says, let's roll.
And what happened was he was on the phone and he was talking to the operator and they said the Lord's Prayer together and then he said, let's roll.
So it's just taken out and it's just muttered in what's supposed to be realism.
Let's roll, let's go, let's go, let's roll.
You know, it's just thrown away.
The line's thrown away.
That's supposed to look like realism, but it wasn't what really happened.
It's not realism.
What really happened was he prayed and then he went forward.
I feel in a lot of our culture, from good culture to bad culture, I feel that the default position that there is no God, that people who pray, there's one person in Sully who says, have a blessed day, and she's obviously an idiot.
You know, she's obviously like this smiley, evangelical, crazy person, and you don't care about her at all.
And like, I feel that an atmosphere is being created.
We are allowing a default atmosphere that is a kind of preaching.
And so when I talk about God, people say to me, don't preach, you're preaching.
But they don't understand they're being preached to every single second in every single movie they see, in every book they see, in every family that doesn't say grace like many families do, in every family where the children don't pray at night, which many families do.
All those things are being sold to you all the time to create an atmosphere in which it feels strange to believe, in which it feels like you're the outlier.
And that's how we need to fight back.
You know, one of the things, we're talking about the Never Trumpers, and the Never Trumpers say, you know, we have four years of Hillary and we rebuild the conservative movement.
I think that is a noble principled thing to think.
I don't have a lot of faith in long-term plans like that because anything can happen.
Long-Term Plans Doubtful00:02:27
Wars can happen, you know, floods, you know, guys can die, the president can die.
All these things can happen.
But the long-term strategy I do have faith in is changing the culture, making sure that things are just reality, just reality, that people pray when they would pray, that people believe when they would believe, that things that look like miracles are explored as if, hey, maybe there was something offbeat that happened here, that that's possible.
You know, a guy like Mel Gibson shouldn't be driven back to alcoholism because he makes a movie of faith.
He shouldn't be hammered into the ground, his weakness is exploited, his brokenness made worse, simply because he makes a movie about Jesus Christ that should not happen.
And we should fight, that's what we should fight back against.
And that's the long-term strategy that I believe in.
All right.
Finally, stuff I like.
I have to do one more war story.
And this one I wanted to bring up because if you're not a novel reader, a lot of people don't read fiction anymore.
I wanted to bring up something that is an easy read, but also very close to a great novel.
It may be a great novel.
I would have to come back in 100 years and see if it's still relevant.
But right now, it feels like a truly great novel.
And that's a Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Don't watch the movie.
If you watch the movie, watch the old movie with Gary Cooper because it's very close to the book.
But read, you know, the first page of A Farewell to Arms is one of the best pieces of prose writing I have ever read.
The description of a retreat from battle is classic.
The love story is one of the most beautiful love stories ever.
And Hemingway, you know, Hemingway has a reputation of being a kind of burly, you know, he-man.
He had a lot of issues.
You know, one of his sons became a transgender guy and all this stuff, or transgender woman.
I don't never know what to call anybody.
And he had a lot of issues about the men and women when they love each other becoming similar and like turning into one another and all this.
And so the love story is very rich and strange and complex, but also incredibly moving.
The woman in it is one of the most, I fell so crazily in love with this heroine that I couldn't bear to stop reading the book.
So A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, a great American classic, really an easy read and just a beautiful, beautiful story.
That's it.
One more day before Thursday.
And then like I said, I have to go away Monday and Tuesday, so I won't be here the first part of next week.
So you better be here tomorrow, clinging to every moment of wisdom and joy and fulfillment that we will bring you, or maybe not, who knows?