Ep. 209 dissects Trump’s Gettysburg speech—his "drain the swamp" plan (term limits, lobbying bans) vs. media fixation on lawsuits—while slamming Clinton’s corruption ties, like McAuliffe’s $467K PAC donation to an FBI-linked official. The host argues conservative grievance politics lack Reagan’s liberty vision, contrasting Trump’s oppositional rhetoric with Affleck’s The Accountant, where anti-heroes escape moral judgment. Halloween film picks include Nosferatu (1922), a legally contested vampire classic, as the election descends into partisan whining. [Automatically generated summary]
As many of you know, Hollywood is a delightful land of fun and fantasy where starry-eyed dreamers come from every broken home and rehab facility across America to turn their miserable lives into the kind of entertainment that will spread their fetid imaginations over your mind like a stain.
Or a virus.
Or possibly one of those really nasty funguses that starts in your big toenail and ends up consuming your entire body so you look like someone tried to make a model of a human being out of cottage cheese and then forgot about it and the thing turned green and started to stink.
What was I talking about?
Oh yeah, Hollywood.
Today, for a change of pace, I thought I'd take a little time off from the hurly-burley of politics and bring a little of that Hollywood glamour and romance and intellectual poison into your humdrum lives by letting you in on my latest film project.
I've recently started work on a delightful and hilarious new comedy screenplay called White.
Think of it as a sort of sequel to Big, the 1988 smash starring Tom Hanks.
As you may remember, in Big, a little boy wishes he could be big, and lo and behold, the next morning he wakes up a little boy in a man's body.
And I know I don't have to tell you, hilarity ensues.
My story, White, is about the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama.
One day, near the end of his term, Barack is reading the New York Times, a former newspaper.
And he thinks to himself, wow, it says here, I've achieved so much.
I've fixed our healthcare system, ended the wars in the Middle East, and brought our nation's races closer together.
Imagine what I could have accomplished if it weren't for all the racism I've experienced.
I wish I could be white for just a day.
Well, what do you know?
The next morning, the president wakes up and hold the phone, he's turned into a white man, just as he wished.
Well, Barack is so excited, he immediately calls a press conference.
The reporters take one look at him and start shouting questions.
Mr. President, says the reporter from the Times, how does it feel to be one of the most incompetent failures who's ever held the highest office in the land?
It's not our job to respect you, the reporter points out.
The fact is, your health care bill is a disaster.
Your bungling of the Middle East has left the area in flames.
You've made racial tensions so much worse, and the economy sucks.
But I'm the first black president, says Barack.
It's racist to call me a failure.
The first black president, says the reporter, but you're white.
Oh, no, says Barack, and he quickly rushes off to the Oval Office where he cries out, please, Lord, make me black again.
And sure enough, the next morning he wakes up black, and he's the best president ever.
It says so right there in the New York Times.
Doesn't that sound like a hilarious movie?
I'm already planning a sequel about Hillary Clinton.
It's called Mail.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Hooray, hurrah, the clavinless weekend is over.
And what a claven-less weekend it was, man.
Internet Down?00:15:24
The internet, the internet went down.
And do you know how the internet went down?
Do you know how they did it?
Have you heard about this?
Oh, man, this is really scary.
Every time you make a request on the internet and it goes into one of these things called the DNS, I can't remember what it stands for, but it doesn't matter.
A domain name service or something like this.
So what they did is they infected all these objects, everyday household objects that you may have, like a baby monitor, a cell phone, anything that hooks into the internet, and they put malware in it so that they would all suddenly go off at once and storm the DNSs and shut them down.
And so it was all in your stuff.
They took over your stuff, your individual household stuff that goes to the internet, and they infected it with malware, and then it all went off and shut the internet down.
And so I mentioned this to start the show.
We're going to get to the election, get to Donald Trump at Gettysburg, because I thought that was a really kind of remarkable speech he gave at Gettysburg and what that means.
But before, this is kind of the theme of the show.
I don't know about anybody else, but I find this with WikiLeaks.
I find it with, I found it with this hack over the weekend.
When I was in college, I wrote an essay on Paradise Lost, which is the famous poem about Satan falling from heaven and his polluting, he's engineering the fall of mankind as revenge against God.
And every undergraduate notices as he reads this great poem that Satan is kind of the hero of the piece.
You're kind of rooting for Satan in some way.
You know, you realize he's evil, but at the same time, you kind of like him.
He's kind of an anti-hero.
And every undergraduate in the world writes, you know, about Satan being the anti-hero.
I was the same.
And I wrote this piece in which I said, you know, when somebody is, when there is an absolute power, even if it's an absolute power for good, there's something heroic about taking it on.
You know, there's something just in that the human heart instinctively responds to this individual defying this absolute power, even if it's the absolute power of goodness.
And my professor, who was one of the most famous Milton scholars of his time, I was at Berkeley, which was like one of the great English departments in the world, he wrote on the corner of my piece, this is moral applesauce, which was, I don't know if they still use that expression, that's an expression for BS.
This is moral BS.
And I thought, I wasn't making a moral point.
It had nothing to do with morality.
I was just making a point.
But I was right about this.
I was right about this.
When something is that powerful, even if the power is benign, there is something that the human heart responds to about people taking it on.
So WikiLeaks, Julian Assange is not our friend.
Julian Assange is not the friend of Republicans or conservatives just because right now he's releasing stuff about Hillary Clinton.
And yet, and yet, the government is now such a powerful, powerful instrument, whether you like what it's doing or you don't like what it's doing, that's something about this antic individualistic craziness where just a guy, you know, they're saying it might be somebody fighting for Julian Assange to get back at the fact that John Kerry influenced the Ecuadorians to shut down his internet and all this stuff.
You know, there's something about it that you kind of respond to.
You kind of say like, yes, you know, freedom, freedom, you know, like Braveheart, you sort of say freedom, rebellion.
And even in this, you know, and when you're watching AT ⁇ T taking over Time Warner, making a bid to take over Time Warner, and this is not your cable service, if you have Time Warner cable service, they already unloaded that.
But this means that like one company is now going to be controlling all this stuff.
And what happens is this?
They have to go through all these, they have to jump over all these government hoops, right?
All these regulatory hoops to make this merger come through.
So the government, which loves the government, is now going to be making sure that AT ⁇ T doesn't change anything like the fact that CNN loves the government and HBO loves the government.
The left wing, which is the government, remember, the left is always for the government.
It's always for bigger, bigger, bigger government.
It's always going to solve all your problems through the government.
It's now going to be regulating this one big company and saying, and if you want this to go through, by the way, they're going to call it independence.
Make sure CNN remains independent.
Make sure CNN remains.
CNN is not independent.
CNN is the hack political communication arm of the Democratic Party.
And so is HBO, which does great shows, all of which lean left.
I mean, there is no, you show me a show.
You know, they did that thing on Anita Hill, this debunked woman, this debunked charges against Clarence Thomas, which wouldn't have been important even if they hadn't been debunked.
But, you know, they just completely took Clarence Thomas apart.
They've been rewriting history on HBO.
Lyndon Johnson is the great civil rights hero.
All this stuff that they do on HBO, you think that's going to go away if the government is in control of it?
And this is what people are so furious about.
They can't, you can't move.
You can't breathe.
And when something goes wrong, who do you turn to?
You turn to daddy.
You turn to the people with all the power.
What are you doing wrong that's making my life miserable?
You're no longer taking responsibility for your own life.
You just want to get back at the power.
Hence, Donald Trump.
So Donald Trump looks like he's losing.
And maybe he's not.
Maybe it's all a scam.
But even Kelly Ann Conway came out and said, well, you know, this is, before we go to Kellyanne Conway, this is the aftermath of the third debate, which I thought Trump won handily.
I thought he won going away, but the press spun it into this whole thing about he says elections are being rigged, so he's the enemy of democracy.
But let's just take a quick look at a recap of the third debate.
Let's do this in B-flat minor. Cheers.
We have so many adversaries of the feast.
Can we all agree to be friends?
I would work with Tyrolis in the Middle East.
That's the only way we're going to keep the peace.
Okay, muggle, muggle, mux hope.
So sad, so sad.
It's a catastrophe.
So be it, so be it.
Can everyone achieve the American dream?
Or should they sign up for my Ponzi team?
We are going to go where the money is.
All right.
We are going to go small businesses.
Our jobs are being sucked out of our economy.
Right now, our country is dying, dying victory.
They please kill the show.
We've got to do the song of I with weird Aliyankovic they got in this time.
These have been my favorite parodies of the election because they're actually pretty fair.
You know, they actually just make fun of everybody.
Anyway, so the last debate is over.
The polls, like, it's really hard to tell because there are these outlying polls like the Investor Business Daily poll and all this stuff.
But look, at this point, there are places, there are polls that are showing Texas as a toss-up.
You know, Texas, where they're supposed to be like lining up on the border with guns to make sure nobody like Hillary Clinton even thinks about Texas.
Texas may be on the line.
And even Kellyanne Conway, the head of Trump's campaign, his communications person, is saying they're behind.
We are behind.
She has some advantages, like $66 million in ad buys just in the month of September, thereby doubling her ad buys from August.
Most of those ads are negative against Donald Trump, classic politics of personal destruction, cesspool kind of ads.
And she has tremendous advantages.
She has a former president, happens to be her husband, campaigning for her, the current president or first lady, vice president, all much more popular than she can hope to be.
And she's, but she's seen as the incumbent.
So our advantage going in, where we're behind one, three, four points in some of these swing states that Mitt Romney lost to President Obama Chuck.
Our advantage is that Donald Trump is just going to continue to take the case directly to the people.
He doesn't expect to be able to cut through the noise or the silence and the way we're treated by some.
And so he's taken the case.
He's going to visit all these swing states many times, as is his running mate, Governor Pence.
And we feel that with Hillary Clinton under 50% in some of these places, even though she has run a very traditional and expensive campaign, that we have a shot of getting those undecided voters that somehow have said, I know who Hillary Clinton is.
I don't want to vote for her.
I don't much trust or like her.
We need to bring them aboard over the next couple of weeks.
Now, this is why this is maddening.
It really does look like he's certainly, let's say he's fighting an uphill battle.
Let's put it that way.
And look, if ever things were going to go differently than the polls said they were, this is the election year.
I wouldn't count on it.
Let's be realistic.
The polls have been pretty accurate for the last two elections cycles.
Here's why this is so maddening to even someone like me who doesn't like Trump and wishes we had come up with another nominee.
There is a story in the Wall Street Journal this morning on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that's huge.
It's going to flash across your screens for 10 minutes and then it's going to be gone with the next nonsense story that the left drums up to take down Trump.
The political organization of Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with long-standing ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton's email use.
Okay?
You've got that, right?
Terry McAuliffe, he's broken records for raising funds for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He gave $500,000 to the election campaign of a wife of an FBI official who oversaw the election in two Hillary Clinton's emails.
The investigation that essentially said, yes, she's violated the law, but we're not going to prosecute her because something, something, something, because she's Hillary Clinton, basically.
Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe's political action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.
The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207 plus $1,000.
And a spokesman for the governor said he supported Jill McCabe because he believed she would be a good state senator.
This is a customary practice for Virginia governors.
Any insinuation that his support was tied to anything other than his desire to elect candidates who had helped pass his agenda is ridiculous.
And we will find out why the word ridiculous does not apply here in just a moment.
But first we have to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to the Daily Wire.
Come on, it's home.
You can subscribe for eight lousy bucks, lousy eight bucks a month, and you can see the entire show on the Daily Wire streaming live and also get Ben Shapiro's show.
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Come on over.
Okay, so it's utterly ridiculous because there's no smoking gun, remember?
There's no smoking gun that says he was doing this, you know, to buy off the FBI agent.
And the candidate goes on to say there's absolutely no connection between her husband and her as he's running for the campaign.
Terry McAuliffe has been under investigation for fundraising irregularities since the 1990s, okay?
And some of them, one of them was, let me just read this, this is from the Washington Examiner.
He gave $120,000 to, $120,000 were given to his gubernatorial campaign by a billionaire who served in China's communist legislature.
His business and political dealings have raised questions repeatedly.
For example, in the 1990s, as McAuliffe set records raising money for the Clintons, congressional investigators uncovered a Chinese government scheme to funnel money to the Clinton operation through a number of business people, including a man named Charlie Tree.
In that case, okay, so Chinese money coming in to influence our elections, which we know the Democrats don't like because when WikiLeaks does it and they say it's the Russians, we're supposed to be really upset about that.
But when the Chinese come in and influence, send them money, then it's okay.
In that case, 94 people either refused questioning, pled the Fifth Amendment, or left the country.
So, you know, this guy has been dirty.
I mean, his handling of money has been dirty from the beginning.
This is why this drives me crazy that Trump may be blowing this election, is because, as I said before, I'm voting against Hillary Clinton.
I'm voting for Donald Trump because I believe, as bad as he may be, he is not connected to this, what do I call it, a circulatory system of corruption that now runs all through our government that Barack Obama has installed in once vaunted institutions like the IRS and the FBI and the Justice Department are now all part of this Democrat machine that she is locked right into.
So now, so this takes us to Gettysburg.
Trump gets up and gives a speech in Gettysburg, and he says he's going to drain the swamp.
And who can look at this without thinking we have to drain the swamp?
I mean, this is a classic example.
You know, the thing about government is leftists are always saying government does many good things.
Yes, but the main thing government does is government.
The main thing government does is tell people what to do.
And just picture, take it to its natural conclusion.
What if there was somebody who told you what to do every day that you woke up, every decision you make, and he was always right?
Would you still want that person in your life?
You'd shoot him.
You'd shoot him down because even a power, even a power that is all-powerful for good, there is something in the human heart that wants to be free, which is why God leaves us free, by the way.
Why God doesn't exert that power?
People are always saying, how can you believe in God when there's so much evil in the world?
It's because God would rather you were free and there be evil.
Even freedom trumps even goodness.
That's how important it is to your creator, okay, and how important it should be to you as well.
So Trump goes out and he gives this speech, and he lines up all the stuff he's going to do right away, first day in office, first hundred days in office.
And of course, the press completely ignores that stuff and just talks about this stuff where he talks about the government being rigged.
1.8 million dead people are registered to vote.
And some of them are voting.
I wonder how that happens.
2.8 million people are registered in more than one state.
These are numbers, folks.
These are numbers.
14% of non-citizens are registered to vote.
The system is also rigged because Hillary Clinton should have been precluded from running for the presidency of the United States.
But the FBI and the Justice Department covered up her crimes, which included lying to the FBI and Congress on numerous occasions and included saying, I do not recall to the FBI on 39 separate times.
Is Corruption Off Limits?00:13:31
Now, the media go nuts about this.
Oh, it's the old, you know, the grievance, and he's playing to his base and all this stuff.
Well, maybe so, maybe so.
But is this off limits?
Is the corruption just supposed to spread and we're supposed to sit here and kind of take it, you know?
Now, here's where I got to play this clip about the press.
Trump goes off in the media, and nobody hates the news media more than I do.
I just think that they are a dishonest Democrat hack operation.
That's all I think they are.
I don't think the New York Times, I don't think, it's not that they lie.
It's the stuff that they leave out.
I have no respect for them personally as people.
I have no respect for what they do.
I have no respect for their organs of information.
Anything you can say about them, I think, is true.
So Trump goes off and he starts to talk about this.
And listen to what he says.
Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign.
Total fabrication.
The events never happened.
Never.
All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.
But a simple phone call placed to the biggest newspapers or television networks gets them wall-to-wall coverage with virtually no fact-checking whatsoever.
Here is why this is relevant to you.
If they can fight somebody like me who has unlimited resources to fight back, just look at what they can do to you, your jobs, your security, your education, your health care, the violation of religious liberty, the theft of your Second Amendment, the loss of your factories, your homes, and much more.
Look at what they've done to you with your jobs.
Okay.
So what he's saying is if a powerful guy like him can be run down, steamrolled by the press, think of what they can do to you.
And that seems to have some kind of resonance.
And that line about suing the women just is what Trump does when he puts his foot, you know, first he shoots himself in the foot, then he puts the foot in his mouth.
You know, I think the problem is he puts the foot in his mouth first and then shoots himself in the foot.
He blows his own head off.
You know, this is the politics of personal grievance.
You know, you don't, this guy is too powerful to sue some lady even if she lied about him.
Even if she lied about him, it is beneath him to punch down like that.
It's beneath him, a presidential candidate, to say, I'm going to sue the people who are trying to defame me.
I mean, John Kerry, you didn't hear John Kerry talk about suing the Swiftboat people, you know, who really undermined his campaign and did a good job of it, probably telling the truth.
You know, it's just, it's just, you are the powerful one.
You've got to behave like the power.
The rules are different for you if you're powerful, and the rules are different than what you have to say.
And it's so frustrating to watch, you know, after this is over, let's just assume for a minute, let's just stipulate that Trump is going to lose.
After this is over, we who are on the right are going to have to find a way forward.
Some of you, your plan is to just storm Ben Shapiro's offices and drag him out and kick him around because it's all his fault, you know.
And that could be fun.
But obviously, obviously, neither Ben or Jonah or any other never Trumper is the reason this guy is going to lose if he loses.
It's all on him.
It really is.
I mean, this guy had the passion of the people.
He almost closed the gap.
He spent no money.
He has no ground game.
And he almost closed the gap with Clinton until he started blowing himself up with his politics of personal grievance.
Now, let's hear the meat of his speech.
This is his drain the swap swamp point.
He has a six-point plan of what he's going to do to drain the swamp of corruption.
Let's listen to it.
First, a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.
Second, a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition, exempting military, public safety, and public health.
Third, a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.
Regulations are killing our country and our jobs.
Fourth, a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service, making a fortune.
Fifth, a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.
Very bad.
Sixth, a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.
That's what's happening.
So that's pretty good.
I mean, there's one on there, the term limits.
There's some controversy about this because one of the arguments is that if you have term limits, because they have term limits in California, and it's a one-party government, but you can still move around the government.
What I'd like to see, I'd like it to be like the ancient kings where after their one year was over, they killed them.
And then we sacrifice you to our dark gods.
You know, that would be my idea.
But the idea is that if you have term limits, then only the lobbyists are the permanent government.
Only the influencers know anything, and everybody else is always learning his way forward.
I don't care.
I'm for term limits.
I think he's right about that.
I think the other five points are really good, really strong.
But of course, nobody is paying attention by the time you said you're going to sue women.
That's the headline.
You know, how dumb, how dumb do you have to be to erase what you're saying?
You know, what everybody's saying is he's still playing to his base.
He's still playing to his base because that's what he's going to use to form his TV network after he loses, basically.
You know, and maybe that's what's going on.
But, you know, a while back, Ben had Tom Sowell on his show.
And Thomas Sowell said in almost the exact words I had said to Ben like two days before that he was voting against Hillary and this was why.
And he explained he was saying why he would vote for Trump even though he didn't like Trump.
And Thomas Sowell is like the wisest political observer we have and I think he still is even in his 80s.
And I thought like, wow, that's pretty good.
He's saying the same thing I was saying.
I feel pretty good about that.
But Charles Krauthammer is also a very wise guy.
And he says he's not voting for anybody.
He is going to write in, here he is saying he's just going to write in his vote.
It's a question of conscience.
The fact is I cannot vote for Donald Trump.
I thought that on the day he announced.
I said it that night.
I said on special report, I didn't think he was even a serious candidate.
I got that wrong about the fact that he wouldn't be a factor.
But I think I got it right that he's unfit for the presidency.
And I have never changed my mind on that.
As to Hillary, the dilemma I set it out in my column today in the Washington Post, she's a cynical politician with an empty core where her beliefs are supposed to be to the extent she has them.
It's conventional liberal, which I think is a threat to the Constitution.
And you saw in the last debate where she said basically the point of the Supreme Court is to defend the little guy.
The oath of office for a judge is to say that he does not explicitly, they have to swear not to recognize rich or poor.
This is complete overturning of the point of the law.
So Nick Searcy, my friend, as he calls himself the international film and TV star, but he's a terrific actor and he played the boss on Justified, a great TV show.
And he tweeted out, well, I've lost a lot of respect for Charles Krauthammer, but I feel really differently about this.
When somebody that I respect as much as I respect Krauthammer disagrees with me, I question myself, and I look at where I stand again, and I still stand where Soul stands.
I still think that the corruption has eaten so deeply into our government structures, and it's all left-wing corruption.
It's all left-wing corruption, not a little bit right-wing, it's all left-wing corruption.
And Hillary Clinton is right at the heart of that corruption, and putting her in there is going to make it worse and make it all kind of unified and give the little guy, us, which is everybody.
I mean, it's everybody.
It's going to give the little guy no fighting chance whatsoever.
Trump, you know, I don't have a lot of high hopes for him.
I don't have a lot of high hopes for him, but whatever he is, he is not as locked in to that system as she is.
Is he separate from it?
I think that's an illusion.
I think it's an illusion to say he's separate from that corruption.
He's been a Democrat supporter all his life.
He's given plenty of money to Hillary Clinton.
You know, to say that he is the unique rebel angel who's going to come and save us all is ridiculous.
I just think he's a little bit less competent, and it's clear that the structure hates him.
The structure really wants to take him down.
And so I think that that is the thing that I support.
But, but where we have gone wrong is this.
You know, I was at a meeting over the weekend where I think everybody in the room was pretty much a liberal except for me.
It was one of those discussions where people got up and talked about things, and my job was to talk about the election from the right.
And one of the things I love about these things is it reminds me when I meet left-wing people, which I do a lot because I live in LA, that they're perfectly, we're not talking about the leadership of the Democrat Party, which is corrupt.
We're talking about ordinary people who vote Democrat.
They're perfectly nice people like you and me, you know, who just want things to go well and they think this is the way to make things go well.
And they were shocked that someone like me, because I have all the trappings of liberalism, I was a liberal.
I come from the places they come from.
I care about the things that they care about, the arts and the, you know, the poor and all the things that, you know, people, I don't, I'm perfectly happy with gay rights.
I don't care what people do in their private lives.
To hear me talk about why I'm a right-winger, they actually listened.
It was shocking.
I was looking at their faces and they were going, like, what?
You know, what he's saying?
What is he saying?
Why is he saying that?
And I got a chance to, there was a guy there who was just, he was just like a walking left-wing talking points.
You know, Citizens United, dark money, this and that.
You know, and he was just like, he was just hammering me.
And of course, he didn't know any, you know, he didn't know what Citizens United is.
He just heard that they have dark money and all this stuff.
Of course, he said, that's why Donald Trump is the nominee.
And I thought, why did, you know, Donald Trump, Donald Trump has, if there's dark money involved in this election, it's all on the left.
It's all, you know, she has so much more money than he does.
But it gave me an opportunity to say, look, this is what Citizens United says, you know.
And the reason I come away thinking that the reason the right is always on the defensive is because we're always defending something.
We're never proposing anything.
The reason we are always fighting a rearguard action in retreat is because we're always opposing whatever it is they're doing and never proposing what it is we want.
People want to be involved in something bigger than themselves.
To the point that if you read about the Soviets after the Soviet Union fell, they missed Stalin.
They missed Stalin.
He was wiping them out in droves and they missed him.
Why?
Because he gave meaning to their lives.
And now capitalism came in and suddenly they weren't part of any great mission.
They were just part of buying and selling.
And they were disgusted by it.
They were disgusted by capitalism.
They were, oh, my, you know, all anybody cares about now is how rich they are.
They don't care about books.
They don't care about ideas and all this.
We never speak to them.
We haven't since Reagan, we haven't since Reagan spoken about the great enterprise of human liberty.
This is what we're about.
It's hard because we don't have a unified idea.
Hillary Clinton's ideas were stronger together.
Our ideas were stronger separately.
We're stronger when each one of us comes up with a fresh idea and the rest of us test it by saying yes or no.
Uber, yes.
I mean, pet rocks for a little while and we get out.
I mean, it's like that is the system that we're proposing.
And you need to have a visionary voice.
And Donald Trump doesn't have it.
You know, he has that slogan, make America great again.
That's where his vision ends.
And all this stuff, he's going to stop this and he's going to stop that.
He's going to sue this one and this one stinks and all this stuff.
It is not the visionary voice we need.
Hillary Clinton, obviously, who could be more cynical?
Who could be more empty?
But, but she knows how to speak that language of good and evil.
The press knows how to speak that language of good and evil.
We don't.
We only speak the language of evil.
We only speak the languages.
We have to stop this.
We have to stop this one.
We have to stop that one.
We have to stop this change.
We have to stop that change.
We never say what it is, the overall vision that we want people to take part in, that vision of liberty, of individual people striving forward into a world in which we do make a better world, but we make it one free man and woman at a time.
Until we start to talk like that, we're never going to win again.
We're never going to win because this politics of grievance, if we keep it up after, if Trump loses and all we do afterwards is sit around blaming the never Trumpers, we're going to just lose and lose and lose forever because you cannot win with a negative message ultimately.
It's just not going to happen.
Ben Affleck Controversy00:06:52
All right, you know, let me just say, I'm going to go a little long and talk about, I went and saw the accountant over the weekend, this Ben Affleck picture.
I must be the only person on the right who thinks Ben Affleck is really good.
I really enjoyed watching him.
He's not the greatest actor in the world.
The reason I know that is because his brother is, I think, Casey Affleck is the greatest actor in the world.
But he's got charisma.
You know, he's a movie star and he comes on and he just like, you know, you just root for him and there's something about him.
And I know once he starts talking off camera, you just want to set him on fire.
But that's, all right.
So this is about a guy with, what's it called, Asperger's syndrome, who is a brilliant accountant, and he starts working for bad guys doing their forensic accounting.
So for instance, if I'm a bad guy, a drug lord, and somebody's been ripping me off, I bring in the accountant to go over my books and find out who it is I have to kill.
Okay, that's basically what it is.
And he's this kind of adorably, you know, withdrawn Asperger's guy who only responds to numbers.
That's all he responds to.
And Anna Kendrick, is it Anna Kendrick?
Great use of her.
I mean, she's a very charming actress, and great use of her as this kind of little woman locked up in an accounting firm who tries to make a connection to this guy.
And he can't quite get there.
And here's the scene where she tries to approach him.
How did you get into financial consulting?
Department of Labor statistics indicate it's one of the fastest growing professions.
Actuarial sciences are experiencing tremendous growth as well.
Okay.
I like the balance of it.
You know, I like finding things that aren't obvious.
Plus, my dad was an accountant.
He actually, you know, he had the whole shtick.
The, you know, the little amortization book and the green eye shade and the like dorky pocket protector.
I have a pocket protector.
That's a nice one.
I mean, his was dorky, that's, yours is nice.
But he convinced me to go into the field because I wanted to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago, but art doesn't pay the mortgage.
Art doesn't pay the mortgage, young lady.
Dad's taste ran more to dogs playing poker.
I like dogs playing poker.
Because dogs would never bet on things, and so it's incongruous.
I like incongruity.
You just can't quite connect with her, and she's trying so hard.
It really is touching.
Here's the thing.
Completely immersive movie.
You know, it's one of those movies when as I'm driving home and I start to consider what the movie was actually about, it's absurd.
You know, the premise of the movie is absolutely ridiculous, you know.
But while I'm watching the movie, it was really exciting, really entertaining.
And after all, you don't want your movies to make too much sense.
It was really entertaining, really exciting, well done, well acted and all this stuff.
But fascinatingly, it lacks a moral center.
It's kind of in keeping with what we're talking about.
This guy, Ben Affleck, who is no question the hero of the movie, does bad things.
We like him because he has a code and he lives by his code.
And if you break his code, he comes after you.
And so we like him.
That's how an anti-hero works.
So we respect that he has a code and it's a moral code.
But really, he's doing terrible things.
He's helping terrible people.
And the movie never deals with that.
When I say it has a moral voice, I don't mean that there's not clear good guys and bad guys.
The Sopranos had a very moral voice.
It's about these terrible, terrible mobsters, but it's written with a moral vision.
There's a very intense moral vision behind the Sopranos.
This doesn't have that.
And I think this is part of what I'm talking about today, is this idea that it is just anybody who takes on the power at this point.
We are feeling so small, we are feeling so overwhelmed, we're feeling so helpless in the face of this massive corruption that anybody who takes on the power becomes the hero, like Satan in Paradise Lost, just because he's taking it on.
It didn't even bother me.
It usually bothers me when bad guys are romanticized.
I can't play that game, the one about the Grand Theft Auto.
I can't play it.
I can't play a guy who drags innocent people out of their cars and beats them over the head with a tire iron.
I just can't do it.
It just makes me feel sick to my stomach to watch it happening and think that that's me in the game, that that's my character in the game.
But this, it didn't even bother me because he makes the world such a, realistically, so much, so much in favor of the powers that be that anyone who stands up against it becomes the hero no matter what it is he stands for.
And that's the situation we're in.
It's kind of a dangerous situation to be in.
And unless somebody on the right, somebody with real values, puts forward a bigger vision, something that we can belong to that is not, that doesn't crush us, that doesn't control us, that doesn't sweep us away, and yet is still a great vision, until that happens, you know, guys like, they're going to make movies where guys like this thug, essentially, are the hero, and it's going to resonate.
It's going to mean something.
All right, I have to do a quick Hollywood Halloween stuff I like.
I wanted to pick some old stuff that's still scary.
I'll go through it really quickly.
Few old movies remain scary.
They get kind of clunky and all this stuff.
But really old stuff.
If you've never seen the silent version of Phantom of the Opera with one of the first color scenes in it, it has one scene in it that's in color.
Phantom of the Opera remains a really creepy movie.
There's a film called Vampier, maybe it's pronounced Vampire, V-A-M-P-Y-R, made in the 1930s.
It's in German, I think, that comes with subtitles.
Very creepy film.
And then, of course, there is the great classic of all classics, which is Nosferato, a symphony of horror.
And this is a 1922 silent movie, one of the classics of the silent screen by F.W. Murnau and Max Schreck starring Count Orlock.
And what it was was, not everybody knows this.
It's just a complete ripoff of Dracula, of the novel Bromstoker's Dracula.
But they couldn't get the rights to it.
So they just changed the name, Count Orlock, instead of Dracula.
And Stoker sued and demanded, the estate sued, I guess it was, and demanded that the films be destroyed.
And so they had to destroy this classic of cinema because they hadn't gotten the rights, but a few of them were rescued.
And it's still a terrific movie.
It was remade, and there have been movies made about the movie, but it's really, really spooky.
And if you can get your mind into the place of watching a silent film with enjoyment, this is one of the greatest silent films ever made and one of the great horror films ever made.
Bitching and Moaning About Dracula00:00:18
Nosferatu.
All right, we'll be back with more whining and complaining and attacks and bitching and moaning, basically.
But as this election continues to its horrifyingly inevitable conclusion, I'm Andrew Clavin.