Ep. 204 skewers the 2016 election as a farce: Trump’s campaign collapses with just two women supporters, mocked by a final ad, while The New York Times verifies sexual misconduct claims—kissing, groping—from three accusers, including a 35-year-old plane assault. Clinton’s leaks reveal no bombshells but expose elitist jabs at Catholics as "severely backwards." Media bias is exposed: outlets weaponize scandals for politics while ignoring left-wing hypocrisy. The choice isn’t policy—it’s picking between two corrupt figures in a media-manufactured morality play, leaving voters trapped in a rigged game. [Automatically generated summary]
There are now some indications that the presidential race of 2016 may be slipping away from Donald Trump.
The latest polls show the Republican candidate for appalling president still has some enclaves of support, with many as the votes of 55%, but with women he only has the votes of Ma Fairweather from just over the holler in Kentucky, who reckons she should be out of the tank by election day, and of Tiffany Goldberg from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who says she wants her vote to really tick off her parents because they bought her a Volkswagen Jeddah instead of the BMW she wanted.
In swing states, Trump is still holding on to a slim lead in Iowa, which has six electoral votes, but when added to his other surefire wins, that only leaves the candidate with a total of six electoral votes.
Subtle signs of surrender are beginning to leak out of the Trump camp.
The campaign has withdrawn ad funding from North and South America, and their final ad is a 30-second spot entitled, Vote for Trump or Watch the New Trump Television Network, whichever you prefer.
The ad is paid for by Steve Bannon's dry cleaning and pizza delivery.
We'll press your pants and bring you pizza to make your taste buds dance.
Trump himself remained defiant at a recent campaign rally in Allahu Akbar, Michigan.
Speaking before a cheering crowd of 50,000 life-size cardboard cutouts of old white men, Trump said, They said I could never get above 42% of the vote, and here I am today with 38% of the vote, and they're still fat and ugly.
Hillary Clinton's campaign was also said to be displaying fresh signs of confidence in the latest WikiLeak hacks of Clinton's emails.
The Democratic candidate for deeply sinister president is found writing to her campaign manager, John Podesta, that her first order as president will be to set the cities of her enemies to the torch and slaughter the residents as they try to escape.
Mrs. Clinton goes on to write, quote, Now at last I am free to manifest myself in my final form as the great dragon of the end of days.
How I will delight at the screams of the unbaptized as they are shoveled into my fanged maw and swallowed into the eternal fires of my inner being.
For the earth is bequeathed to me as my playground, and all who delight in sin shall be the nourishment of my black soul from everlasting unto everlasting.
Unquote.
Clinton's ground game also remains stronger than Trump's.
In Ohio, for instance, her campaign is pledged to deliver three votes for every voter in the state, while Trump has only hired one 86-year-old man to sit on his lawn holding a hand-lettered sign that says, Vote for Ronald Trump.
As Trump's election chances faded, Republicans in Washington seemed to go into a panic, and many could be seen running around Capitol Hill with their hair on fire, stabbing each other in the back while shooting themselves in the foot.
Several political careers died in the melee.
Trump said he was glad the GOP was deserting him because now the shackles were off and his hands were free.
He then used his hands to punch himself repeatedly in the face.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm for hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Years are winging, also singing hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped sit-topsy, the world is it easing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Anderson Cooper's Move00:05:25
So, this is going to be the least surprising set of October surprises ever.
Like, now we have a big surprise.
The media is biased against Trump.
Hillary's biased against America, and Trump's a gorilla, you know?
I mean, I think we all know what is new.
What is it?
So, a lot of dirt flying around, especially the sex stuff.
Yesterday, I could not believe it.
Did you see this Obama erection tape?
I mean, I have to bring this up because it's Obama on the plane as a senator.
This is a long time ago.
He's still a senator.
And for some reason, he becomes aroused in the middle of this phone call.
God knows what he's talking about.
And he stands up and starts displaying this to the girls on the reporters on the plane.
And they're shouting, sit down.
I couldn't tell if they were shouting, sit down to him or like, sit down, you're blocking my view.
And CNN had this tape, and they said, well, they sat on it for years.
And I thought, well, CNN sitting on Obama's erection is just about right.
I think that tells us exactly how that works.
So now, I'm sorry, but you know, did I, it was my fault?
All right.
So now.
So Trump.
Trump now.
This entire election has just degraded everybody, including the show.
So Trump got himself in this bind.
We all sort of saw it coming in this last debate.
Anderson Cooper, you know, he did this thing.
It's all locker room talk with all the nasty stuff he's saying.
And Anderson Cooper corners him during the debate and asks him, has he ever actually done any of this grabbing of women?
Just for the record, though, are you saying that what you said on that bus 11 years ago, that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?
I have great respect for women.
Nobody has more respect for women than I do.
So for the record, you're saying you never did things.
Frankly, you hear these things as said.
And I was embarrassed by it, but I have tremendous respect for women.
Have you ever done those things?
Have respect for me.
And I will tell you, no, I have not.
So I'm sitting next to Shapiro while we're watching this.
Shapiro's going, oh, he fell right into this, because we all know that now they're going to start trotting out the women.
But of course, what could he do?
You know, I mean, I ask a question like that.
I tell you the secret.
Just this is a little inside pro tip.
If you want to get out of that situation, don't attack women.
That'll get you right out.
You know, then you can just tell Anderson what he can do with Obama.
You know, so of course now the women are coming out.
And the New York Times this morning has a big, big story.
Two women say he touched them.
Everybody's got big stories, but this is the one from the New York Times.
These are these two snooty reporters who had that long, long story where, you know, they were shocked to find that women got into bathing suits with Donald Trump and all this.
So they found two women who say that Trump fondled them.
One was a woman in 2005 who introduced herself to him at an elevator and instead of shaking her hand, he kissed her too much, in her opinion.
The other is this woman, Jessica Leeds, who's now a 74-year-old woman.
She says 35 years ago, she was sitting on a plane next to a guy who said he was Donald Trump.
I don't know, I guess.
You know, let's assume it was Donald Trump when he started to grope her.
Here's Jessica Leeds.
Somehow or another, the armrest in the seat disappeared.
And it was a real shock when all of a sudden his hands were all over me.
He started encroaching on my space.
And I hesitate to use this expression, but I'm going to.
And that is he was like an octopus.
It was like he had six arms.
He was all over the place.
And if he had stuck with the upper part of the body, I might not have gotten, I might not have gotten that upset.
But it's when he started putting his hand up my skirt.
And that was it.
That was it.
I was out of there.
And I don't think I said a word.
During the late 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, culture had instilled in us that somehow it was our fault the attention that we received from men, that we were responsible for their behavior.
The even worse one was a woman in People magazine, a writer for People magazine, who said she went to cover, what was her name, Natasha?
Hold on if I can find it.
Yeah, Natasha Stoinoff.
She said she went to do an interview with Trump and Melania, and Melania is great with child, as we used to say, and they're doing this whole how happy they are together.
And Trump took her out to show her another room.
She said, we walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us.
I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.
I'm a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers.
I even once sparred with Mike Tyson.
That must have been interesting.
It takes a lot to push me, but Trump is much bigger, a looming figure, and he was fast, taking me by surprise and throwing me off balance.
I was stunned.
And I was grateful when Trump's longtime butler burst into the room a minute later as I tried to unpin myself.
So the New York Times, the woman, the two writers, Michael Barbaro and Megan Touhey, these are these two people.
Wikileaks Scandal Revelations00:15:12
They just, well, let's play them.
They say this is why they felt this story was worth running other than their absolute vendetta to destroy Donald Trump.
What we do is we interview the women in both cases more than once to make sure we had, you know, what they told us in their emails and lined up with what they told us in interviews.
And then we also, in both cases, these are women who had shared their stories with friends and family.
In the case of the 22-year-old, she immediately made a phone call to her sister right after this happened.
She went home that night.
She told her boyfriend.
So we talked to the boyfriend.
We talked to the sister.
In the case of Jessica, we talked to other people she had told as well.
And did you talk to Donald Trump?
Yes, but before we get to that, we talked not just to the two women who went on the record and used their names, we talked to the people around them who went on the record and used their names.
There are no anonymous quotations in this story.
These are people who are putting their names and their reputations by the claims that were described in these stories.
I think that's important.
These guys look, I don't know anything about them, but they just look to me like they've never been anywhere but New Haven and 53rd Street.
They have like a little transporter machine.
Yes, I just don't go anywhere else.
I just disappear on 53rd Street and I appear at Yale and then back at 53rd Street and there I am again.
It's like, you know, all right, so they've got these two women.
There are plenty of others.
You know, there are lawsuits against them and all this stuff.
I mean, let's face it, I'm willing to stipulate, I stipulate that all these women are telling the truth.
You know how Hillary Clinton said that stupid thing she said where a woman who accuses someone should be believed?
That's not true.
Everybody lies.
Men, women, everybody lies.
But I believe, like all the Clinton accusers, I believe all the Trump accusers, I'm ready to go.
So, but Trump says no.
There's the reporter saying what Trump said when she called him.
He insisted that all of the allegations were a fabrication and that the New York Times was making them up.
And he got increasingly agitated as I continued my questions and started to yell at me and told me that I was a disgusting human being.
Oh, that's mean.
He's threatening to sue.
He wrote him a letter saying, take it back or I'll sue.
He says it's a complete fabrication, total lie.
In fact, Trump seems to me at this point to be the only person who's having a good time.
He actually seems like he's having a good time.
It's funny because his campaign looks like it's going down the drain.
It looks to me like it is.
It may not be.
I'm willing to believe that everything could turn around.
But he's losing, he's threatening to lose the House and Senate.
The GOP is running.
They're going back to him.
They're running away from him.
They don't know what to do.
They're in a complete panic.
But he is now in his element because he's attacking everybody.
When he said the shackles are off, I'm free.
He meant it because he's like alone against the world.
He's making his speech and he starts in on the press.
Well, let's just hear him.
He's just going off at random, sort of half on the teleprompter and half on his own.
The corporate media can't report on the establishment because the corporate media is the establishment, such a big part of it.
We're going to break up the special interest monopoly and we're going to win this country back for the American people.
we're gonna do it too.
The emails also reveal that Hillary Clinton believes in global governments, unlimited immigration, unlimited much more than Obama.
From the Middle East, come right in.
Come right in.
550% more than President Obama, who is grossly incompetent.
He doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
And why is he campaigning?
We just had a horrible jobs report.
We have no growth.
You saw it, GDP.
At 1%, we have no growth.
We have a horrible jobs report.
China is ripping us off.
Japan is ripping us off with the cars.
Mexico has an unbelievable deal with us, both on the border.
I mean, look at our trade deficit with Mexico.
He says, I haven't even feel it.
He went into a routine.
I didn't bring it in, but he went into a routine.
It's apparently hot where he's talking.
And he said, I'd like to see Hillary Clinton do this for an hour and talk like I'm talking.
And then he does an imitation of her as this decrepit old crone.
He's just having a great time while the GOP goes up and smoke and down in flames.
I think that's it.
So at least, look, at least somebody's having fun.
I think that's the important thing.
And the Wikileaks thing, so this is the other side of this.
The Wikileaks thing, this is hilarious.
I mean, this is hilarious.
Wikileaks has now released maybe 6,000 emails, right?
It's all this stuff.
And there's nothing yet.
There's nothing yet where it's like Hillary Clinton ordering somebody to get dead or something like that.
I don't know what could happen at this point that would let us know that Hillary Clinton is more corrupt than we already know she is.
I mean, this is the thing.
But there is all this embarrassing stuff coming out.
Here's the headline in the New York Times, right, next to their, you know, two women say that 35 years ago, Trump groped me, whatever.
You know, here's the headline.
Trump is embracing an unlikely ally, WikiLeaks.
Donald J. Trump and his supporters are increasingly seizing on a trove of emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign that Wikileaks has been publishing.
This is Clavin's second rule of MSM journalism, right?
If there's a scandal on the left, the scandal's about the scandal.
If there's a scandal on the right, the scandal is about how do they get that information.
You shouldn't go into a Planned Parenthood and take secret pictures of them devouring children.
That's a terrible thing to do.
All right, well, maybe devouring children might be wrong.
It might be wrong.
But to take pictures, that's terrible.
That's a terrible thing.
Valerie Plain, how could you release the name of Valerie Plain?
Never mind that Bush was right about Saddam Hussein getting nuclear material.
Never mind that.
But how did you get?
So this is what the Democrats are pushing.
We got to go off on Facebook and YouTube.
But if you come to the Daily Wire, if you would come to the Daily Wire and subscribe, you could watch the whole thing without interruption.
You can also get it on SoundCloud and iTunes.
But for a lousy $8 a month, you get me, you get Ben, you get everything.
He could be in the mailbag next week.
Come on over.
So this, by the way, is from the newspaper that when WikiLeaks published all this stuff that was damaging to operations in Afghanistan, the Times was the source.
The Times were the people who published it.
You know, they're fine with WikiLeaks, but suddenly it's all about where did these emails come from, you know?
So here's the stuff.
Like, there's information about the elaborate lengths this campaign went to to suppress Hillary's emails.
You know, I mean, they did everything they could think of to keep these emails from coming out.
There's the collaboration with the press.
The New York Times is sending the New York Times.
The New York Times is now a rag.
I would be embarrassed to work for the New York Times.
I really would.
I mean, when I call it a former newspaper, that's too polite.
I mean, it's like, it is worse.
You know, we make fun of Donald Trump for quoting the National Enquirer.
We should start making fun of people for quoting from the New York Times because the New York Times is sending her articles and saying, are these quotes okay?
Are these quotes all right?
You know, Trump is going like, I want that.
I want to have that.
You know, because, I mean, it's just, it's ridiculous.
There's a word that one of the questions from the debate, you know, this town hall debate was actually passed to her word for word a day before so she could say, well, that's a good question.
Let me think about that for a minute and then just rattle off this prepared response.
I mean, it really is.
And then there's just all this stuff that probably happens in every campaign, but it's very insulting.
They call Bernie Sanders supporters self-righteous whiners.
They call a Hispanic party leader, Bill Richardson, one of the needy Latinos.
They call Jake Tapper a word I can't repeat and all this stuff.
But the big thing so far has been this stuff about Catholics and evangelicals and religion.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
The emails show that in 2011, Bodesta and Jennifer Palmieri, who is now a senior Clinton campaign official, received a note from their Center for American Progress colleague John Halpin.
Mr. Halpin notes a media report that Rupert Murdoch and News Corp CEO Robert Thompson raised their kids Catholic.
Mr. Halpin observes that many leading conservatives are Catholic and says that they, quote, must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.
Thank you, Catholics.
Ms. Palmieri responds, I imagine they think that it is the most socially acceptable, politically conservative religion their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals.
The Wall Street Journal goes on to say this is a window into the intolerant, secular soul of the Democratic establishment and perhaps explains why it has done so little to accommodate requests for religious liberty from the little sisters of the poor.
Team Clinton apparently views religion merely as a justification people adopt for their views on politics and gender, because of course they do.
The Democrats have their religion.
Their religion is socialism.
Their religion is them.
They are the gods of their religion and they hate Christians.
They don't hate Muslims.
Why not?
Because they don't think Muslim religion is true.
They know in their hearts that the Christians and the Jews are going to come after them.
So they hate those religions.
They know that that contradicts.
Well, let's just look for a minute.
I just want to take a look at Jennifer Granholm, Michigan governor who is a stand-in for Clinton.
This is their line on the Wikileaks emails.
I love this.
The bigger concern really is why is Wikileaks dripping this out so slowly?
If this Wikileaks is supposed to be the entity that releases everything to the public, what is going on with this slow drip?
I mean, it certainly lends to the suspicion that Wikileaks is doing some bidding on behalf of perhaps either Trump through Russia, Russia through Trump.
I don't, you know, I'm not going to make a big deal about this because it's been set out there.
We know the FBI has confirmed, I think, or at least has been telling the Wall Street Journal, which just reported that in fact the Russians are likely to be the source of the leak through Wikileaks.
But bottom line is the drip, drip, drip is frustrating from this perspective is that Hillary Clinton is out there talking today about the child care tax credit.
Right.
We were just talking about this.
She's going high.
She wants to have people understand the policy.
She was with Al Gore yesterday talking about climate change, which is really an issue.
So she's not going to make a big deal out of the fact that Trump's a Russian spy.
We're going high.
I'm just mentioning he's a Russian spy, but I'm going high.
And of course, the media laps this stuff up.
Anything that gets the focus off the facts.
Look, again, let's stipulate that all this is true.
Let's also stipulate that Trump's going to lose.
Let's even forget, you know, leave the election out of it for a minute.
This is the media doing what they always do.
They are transforming what should be a political discussion into a narrative about good and evil.
We know they do this.
They did this with Mitt Romney, who is the closest thing to a living saint, right?
Here's a guy who never said a bad word to anybody.
And the election, instead of being about, well, Romney has these policies that are going to help the government, and Obama has these policies that have already failed.
Instead of talking about that, what did we talk about?
We talked about, oh, he put a dog on top of his car.
He drove with a dog.
Oh, he stuffed women into binders.
God, that's violent.
It's just typical of the Republicans.
They stuff women into binders.
I mean, this is the stuff where he bullied someone in high school.
He bullied someone in high school.
This is a guy who hadn't had anything but a glass of milk for 50 years.
He bullied someone in high school.
Oh, and then he let a man die because the guy lost his job.
I mean, it's insane they do this.
But now, and remember, I warned you about this.
I warned you that the thing about nominating Trump is that he would be everything they said he was.
The thing is now, they're doing the exact same thing, but they're right.
Like I said, I'm stipulating that everything they say about Trump is true.
I think he's a horrible man, and I'm sure I wouldn't let my daughter anywhere near him unless I was wearing brass knuckles, okay, at the time.
So, you know, let's stipulate that it's all true.
But that's the only difference, because remember, the evil on the left has been normalized.
Think for a minute about Shea Guevara, all right?
Think for Shea Guevara.
If you saw a guy walking down the street with a swastika on his t-shirt, or a picture of Goering or some Hitler or whatever, you would be incensed.
You know, you would think this is dreadful.
This is dreadful.
You see people walk down the street with Shea Guevara on their T-shirts all the time.
You see them with hammer and sickle, you know, belt buckles and things.
It's a fashion accessory.
Here's a picture from the Obama campaign, Obama's Texas headquarters.
Woman on the phone campaigning for Obama.
There's Shea Guevara in the background.
I mean, I'm not even, let's take a look at Obama in Cuba.
You know, there he is with Shea in the background again.
And maybe you can say, okay, well, he's in the country.
I mean, he shouldn't have been in the country in the first place.
But they normalize this evil.
Shea murdered thousands.
Women, children, men.
He was opposed to free speech.
He put people in, hundreds of people in prison.
He destroyed the freedoms of this country of Cuba.
And yet it's okay.
They normalize his evil, and they do the same thing with Hillary Clinton.
You know, on, you know, I have to apologize to Hillary Clinton for one thing I said last time we were on, I guess it was Tuesday.
I said that she had said that one of the emails says she hates everyday Americans.
We came on early on that day because I had to get out early and I read it too fast.
And really what it was saying is she hates the phrase everyday Americans.
It said she hates everyday Americans.
So I apologize for getting that wrong, but she hates everyday Americans.
It wasn't in the email, but she hates everyday Americans.
And, you know, and this is, you know, Eric, and the reason that I had to get off early is because I had to do an interview with my friend Eric Metaxas.
Eric Metaxas, great guy, terrific writer.
He's written about all these Christian heroes like Bonhoeffer, who attempted to assassinate Hitler.
He's a priest, a Lutheran priest who attempted to assassinate Hitler.
Choose Wisely00:02:45
And he has a piece in the Wall Street Journal today saying, can Christians vote for Trump? in which he too acknowledges that Trump is a slav, okay?
And here's what Eric says.
He says, many say they won't vote because choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil, but this is sophistry.
And Eric's allowed to say that because he went to Yale, so he can say it's sophistry.
It is sophistry.
He's absolutely right.
Not voting or voting for a third candidate who cannot win is a rationalization designed more than anything to assuage our consciences.
And then he goes on to talk about Christians that he's written about.
His name slipped his mind, the guy who campaigned in Britain to end slavery, but that and Bonhoeffer.
And he says they had to work with people who were dreadful to get good things done and to prevent bad things from happening.
And he says, he goes on to say, it's a fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the country's chance to have a Supreme Court that values the Constitution and the genuine liberty and self-government for which millions have died is gone.
Not for four years, not for eight, but forever.
Many say Mr. Trump can't be trusted to deliver on the score, but Mrs. Clinton certainly can be trusted in the opposite direction.
Shall we sit on our hands and refuse to choose?
If imperiously flouting the rules by having a private email server endangered American lives and secrets and may lead to more deaths, if she cynically deleted thousands of emails and if her foreign policy judgment led to the rise of Islamic State, won't refusing to vote make me responsible for those suffering as a result of these things?
How do I squirm out of this horrific conundrum?
It's unavoidable.
We who can vote must answer to God for these people whom he loves.
We would be responsible for passing, for passively electing someone who champions the abomination of partial birth abortion, someone who is celebrated by an organization that sells baby parts.
We already live in a country where judges force bakers, florists, and photographers to violate their consciences and faith, and Mrs. Clinton has zealously ratified this.
If we believe this ends with bakers and photographers, we're horribly mistaken.
No matter your faith or lack of faith, this status view of America will dramatically affect you and your children.
For many of us, this is very painful, pulling the lever for someone many think odious.
But consider this.
A vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself.
It is a vote for those who will be affected by the results of this election.
Not to vote is to vote.
See, the thing is, they always do this.
They always make this a battle between good and evil instead of a battle between competing philosophies.
They always decide that the right-winger is the bad guy.
In this case, they're half right.
The right-winger is the bad guy, and the left-winger is the bad guy, only her evil has been normalized by their culture.
Choosing Between Bad Guys00:05:39
Okay?
So these are two bad guys.
And I believe with Eric, I think he's right.
You have to choose.
You have to choose between these two bad guys.
It's not a question of did he grab women and did she attack women who wanted to reveal that her husband had grabbed them or whatever else.
It's a question of what they will do as president.
You're not voting for your mom and dad.
You're not voting for your best friend.
You're not voting for the person who's going to come over and visit you for dinner.
You're voting for the president.
You know, people tweeted me yesterday, a man who can't be faithful to his wife can't be faithful to the country.
Baloney.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, I know that sounds good.
I know that would be true if we were in a movie.
But in real life, people are unfaithful to all kinds of things and still stumble into the right thing.
The question is, which of these two people, which of these two people, because one of them is going to be president, do you think will stumble into anything that's right?
Look, like I said, I'm stipulating Trump is going to lose.
It looks like he can't possibly win.
But just putting it forward is what you do and what you're thinking about.
Don't let the media turn this into a movie, you know, a contest.
Now, I want to talk about, before we go, I want to talk about the fact that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Here is Sarah Danius, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, explaining why Bob Dylan has been given the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He is a great poet.
He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler, a very original sampler.
He embodies the tradition, and for 55, 54 years now, he's been at it and reinventing himself constantly, reinventing himself, creating a new identity.
Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard, he's quoted in the journal this morning, talks about an article by Graydon Carter.
He's one of these snooty guys.
He runs Vanity Fair.
He's a total, total snoot.
And he says, he calls the Trump, Carter calls the Trump ascendancy, the final stage of a dumbed down America.
And Ferguson replies, the question is, who did the dumbing down?
Our public schools, our universities, our entertainment media, television, movies, popular music, the press, glossy magazines like Vanity Fair, surely all of them share in the blame.
And all of them, from the schools to movie studios, rest snugly in the control of liberal Democrats and have done so for 50 years or more.
Bob Dylan was a great songwriter.
I do not want to take anything away from Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan, when you listen to his songs, they are really good.
I could never stand his voice.
I was never down with that whole rough-hewn voice.
But his songs are really good.
When that woman says he's a great poet, that's nonsense.
He's not a great poet.
His songs, at no time, at no time do they recover the depths of human experience and bring them to the surface the way great poetry does.
I mean, there are writers walking the earth who might, might, you know, English and American writers walking the earth who might deserve a Nobel Prize for literature.
Certainly Tom Stoppard deserves one, but he won't get one because he supported Margaret Thatcher.
Possibly Tom Wolf deserves one, but he won't get one because he's a conservative.
I would even say if you wanted to give one to a musical, a songwriter, that Stephen Sondheim, who has done a lot of incredibly brilliant things with lyrics and music and is also a true musician.
I mean, Sweeney Todd is performed by opera companies at this point.
These are guys who have really contributed a literature to the English-speaking canon.
Bob Dylan, he's a great songwriter.
I don't mean to take anything away from him, but to confuse high art with low art is not, high art is not high because it's elitist.
High art is not high because it is complex or hard to read or uses big words or is written by people with glasses or people who went to good schools.
That's what the New York Times thinks high art is.
High art is something that transcends our usual sentimentality, transcends the idea of heroes and villains, transcends all the simple ways of looking at life and plunges us into deeper ways of looking at life.
It is because Americans have been trained by the movies, which is a beautiful art form, but indeed Petals, a simplistic view of the world, has been trained in Captain America and Superman and Spider-Man, instead of Achilles, a complex hero who's not even a hero, instead of the literature of the past and even of the recent American past, there has been great literature in the recent American past, still some really good books written today.
Because America has been schooled in sentimentality, it falls for this nonsense that the press creates of good versus evil.
Oh, Trump said this, he's evil, he can't be president.
If a man cheats on his wife, he can't be.
That is sentimental trash.
It is sentimental trash.
Donald Trump is a bad man.
I don't even think he would be a good president.
Hillary Clinton is a bad woman.
I know she would be an evil president.
You know, I mean, that's really what we're dealing with.
And that's the complexity of life.
That is how complex life is.
And you won't hear it on radio shows.
You won't see it at the movies.
You won't, you sometimes nowadays see it on television, but that's it.
And giving Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature, elevating what he did to literature, is dumbing down the West.
It is continuing to dumb down the West because if they let the West speak, then all their philosophy and the Nobel Prize is as left as it can possibly get.
All their philosophies will be revealed to be sentimental trash used to acquire power.
And I hate to say all this because I really like Dylan.
And so we'll end with stuff I like.
Don't Think Twice00:01:13
We'll end with one of Dylan's truly great songs, Don't Think Twice.
That's a really beautiful hit the road song.
And we'll play a little bit of that and then come back.
It don't matter anyhow.
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, put out your window and I'll be gone.
You're the reason I'm traveling on.
But don't think twice it's alright, babe.
Don't think twice, it's alright.
Great song, but only literature in a declining culture, my friends.
And we'll continue this decline precipitously into the Clavenless weekend.
Only, only the Lord in heaven knows what could possibly happen over this Clavenless weekend, but all of us are going to find out.