Ep. 218 dissects the 2016 election as a choice between Hillary Clinton’s "corrupt machine"—mocked for Benghazi, Gaddafi, and First/Second Amendment hostility—and Donald Trump’s chaotic populism, framed as accidental rather than deliberate constitutional violations. The host, citing Shelby Steele, ties Trump’s rise to backlash against victimhood culture but warns his presidency risks fracturing the GOP between Ryan’s establishment and populist factions. Critiquing Hacksaw Ridge, they praise Mel Gibson’s comeback despite past controversies while rejecting its pacifist moral ambiguity, contrasting it with The Quiet Man’s more nuanced masculinity. Ultimately, the episode laments America’s drift toward authoritarianism—leftist coercion or right-wing anger—urging conservatism rooted in responsibility over power. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, how many times have you said to yourself, I wish this endless campaign would be over, so we can finally bring the term of one of the worst presidents in United States history to an end and begin the term of another of the worst presidents in United States history.
How many times have you said, I can't wait until we can finally vote, be disgusted with the results, start the next endless campaign, and so on until my life is thankfully over?
Well, congratulations, election day is here, and yes, you're also another day closer to death, so things are going just the way you wanted.
This is the day when you put to use your ultimate power as a United States citizen, the power to drive by a polling place at high speed with your pants down and your backside hanging out the window.
So, whether you're a Hillary Clinton voter or a sentient being, it's time for each of you to ask yourself: what are the pros and cons of your candidate?
For Hillary Clinton voters, the cons are that your candidate is patently dishonest and greedy, that she sold access to her government positions in return for personal wealth, and that her decisions concerning Benghazi, Gaddafi, and which man she should marry have each led to disaster.
On the pro side, her dental hygiene seems good, and her cackling laughter sounds exactly like the crows from the telephone wire scene in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, which turned out to be a much better movie on second viewing than we thought it was at first.
Also, Hillary would not only make history as the first woman president, her presidency would almost certainly guarantee no woman would ever be elected to that office again.
So, if you're the sort of sexist who doesn't believe there should be a glass ceiling when you can get one made of concrete, that's certainly a plus.
For Donald Trump voters, the pros are that by putting an ill-educated, unprincipled lout in the Oval Office, we'll probably be raising the tone of the presidency from where it is now.
And since Trump has clearly never read the Constitution, he'll only be violating it by accident as opposed to Hillary, who would be doing it on purpose.
Also, as President Trump rampages through the nation like Godzilla, stomping on the lives and reputations of anyone who opposes him, there's a strong mathematical probability that we'll get to see him crush some of the people we don't like before he stomps on us.
Most importantly, Trump has promised to appoint a Supreme Court justice who will prosecute Hillary for exposing classified information, which would be absolutely great if Supreme Court justices actually did that sort of thing instead of other Supreme Court-y-type activities.
But more seriously, if elected, Donald Trump will embody the righteous anger of the people and will do their will when it comes to ending free trade and maintaining our system of entitlements.
So, those are the cons.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-dee.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing!
Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah!
Oh, come, sweet meteor of death, come and relieve us from our agony.
You know, I went by my church this morning, and there was a line out the door, and I thought, oh, hooray, America is coming back to God.
Then I realized it's a polling place, and I thought, crap, people are voting.
This is a terrible, terrible thing.
So, my endorsement is that you run out and buy my memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, is still only $2.99 on e-books, and you're going to need it because this is the end of the world.
So, these are the last days.
So, did you guys vote?
Did everybody vote?
Yeah, sort of.
So, I voted.
I voted for Trump.
I did it without a qualm, but I was sad, I will tell you.
And I know people get angry.
I see the comments people leave on Facebook and everything, and they're angry at me because I keep saying what a bad guy Trump is.
And all I can tell you about that is this, that this is a marketplace, the place where we talk about ideas on radio or on podcasts or in the newspaper, anywhere.
It's a marketplace.
And where the people go, that's where the information will be.
And so if you want people to lie to you, you will get lies because it's a marketplace.
If what you want, that's, you know, the audience, the customer is always right.
If you want people to lie to you, you'll get lies.
If you want people to tell you that you're righteous, that angry, self-righteous feeling you have is in fact the truth, people will do that.
That's what they'll do.
But it won't be me because that's, you know, I'm here to tell you the way I see it.
It's the only thing I have to offer you.
It's the only reason I'm here is to tell you.
And I'll tell you why, you know, I'll tell you how I came to the decision, because there's still a lot of people, including, I think Ben is still never Trump, isn't he?
He's still, yeah, he's still never Trump.
You know, I make fun.
I have made fun from the very beginning on the fact that Trump voters are angry.
I did that video.
I'm angry, so I'm voting for Trump.
I think it got like 16 million hits on Facebook.
But I'm not making fun of the anger.
I totally understand why people are angry.
And I especially understand with this, when we have a news media that is so arrogant that it can actually, that a network who runs on public air can appoint George Stephanopoulos, a Clinton hack,
to run their news department and think nothing of it and think there's no way that anybody can touch them, no way that anybody can reach them, that they can control information in the entertainment industry, that they can ask you to go to a movie where you just want to see people shoot each other and fall in love and do all the things that people do in movies and then insult your beliefs by attacking conservative principles.
It makes people angry.
We're sort of in the position of a guy who has a really, really bitchy wife, like a wife who just is constantly running him down, telling him that he's nothing, embarrassing him in public, insulting his manhood, and finally he hauls off and clouts her.
Totally understandable, completely in the wrong.
You know, that's the way it is.
If you don't hold your anger in check, then you put yourself in the wrong.
And that's what I think we have done with Donald Trump.
And of course, the political correctness is what drives people crazy.
Shelby Steele, who is one of my favorite political writers, one of the very few people I've ever met, I can count on one hand the people I've met who have ever overawed me.
Like I couldn't think, I shook his hand.
I couldn't think of anything to say to him because I admired the clarity of his thought and his beautiful, beautiful prose so much.
I mean, I've met all these Hollywood stars.
I've had lunch with Hollywood, real Hollywood stars, second-tier guys.
I've had lunch with totally top-notch Hollywood.
It's never really, I mean, I admire their work and all that, and I'm glad to do it, but a guy like Shelby Steele just knocks me out.
And he wrote a piece today in the Wall Street Journal about political correctness and what it has meant and what it means in terms of Donald Trump.
I'll read you just a little bit of it, but it's worth going and looking at the whole thing.
He says, the current election, regardless of its outcome, reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism sits in American life.
As an ideology and certainly as a political identity, conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.
In other words, the policy, when you say you're a conservative, you're less popular than the things you're actually pushing, which I found to be true whenever I speak to left-wingers.
There is a presumption in the culture that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality.
This despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.
And then he goes on to say, why is this?
He says, it's because of slavery and past unfairness to minorities and to women that has created the idea that the U.S. is indebted to these people.
And this has tarred the, you know, hidden, obscured the fact that the U.S. is the most enlightened nation in history.
He says, how do we pay this debt?
In a word, deference.
Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory.
Deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one's innocence, one's innocence of the American past.
Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness and political correctness functions like a despotic regime.
It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.
And he finally says at the end, societies like individuals have intuitions.
Donald Trump is an intuition, at least on the level of symbol.
Maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference, if not as a liberator, then possibly as a reformer.
Possibly he could lift the word responsibility out of its somnambulant stigmatization as a judgmental and bigoted request to make of people.
In other words, it's not bigoted to ask people to take care of themselves.
This, added to a fundamental respect for the capacity of people to lift themselves up, could go a long way toward a fairer and better America.
There's almost an endorsement of Trump.
He's saying just the fact that he's politically incorrect is worthwhile.
And there is another thing that I have talked about a lot, but it's worth mentioning one more time, is that the evils of the right, and there are evils in capitalism, the evil of inequality, the evil of people being left behind, the evil of people with no recourse when they run out of funds, when they run out of luck, when their bad behavior catches up with them.
Just because they acted badly doesn't mean we as a society want to sit there and watch them rot and die.
There are problems with freedom, problems with capitalism that we set out to solve.
The problems with socialism are invisible.
The problems with socialism are inherent to socialism.
You know, Steven Crowder, my pal and a very funny guy, did a Prager video, a Prager University video, where he talked about, he talked about how socialism is inherently bad.
Here's a little bit of it where he explains the argument.
Unlike capitalism, free enterprise, which can only occur truly through voluntary transaction, socialism can only occur at gunpoint.
That's what it comes down to.
If you don't pay your taxes, once you get through the IRS and the auditing and the lawyers and the PR stunts, people make you give the government your money, increasing amount of your money, the more successful you are, or they send in scary men with guns to take you away.
Now, so long as the people having their stuff taken away at gunpoint are in the minority, and the majority feels that they'll get to benefit from more said taken stuff, you'll always be able to win that decision through a popular vote and claim the moral high ground through democracy.
Putting the word democratic in front of your socialism doesn't make it any inherently more moral nor less violent.
Did you get that?
American wannabe socialists also get a job.
That's the thing.
Socialism is force.
Socialism is pure naked force.
They are taking your money and giving it to somebody else because they think they should.
And by the way, the way it works is it's always the middle class who gets stung because they take the money from people who look rich to the lower classes, but not the real rich.
George Soros isn't losing any money to socialism.
You know, it's the guy who makes $250,000, which is a lot of money if you're making $20,000.
You know, it seems like a lot of money, but it's not really that much money if you're living in LA or New York.
That's kind of a middle-class existence.
But the point is, yeah, you're rich to the lower classes, but you're not really rich.
The really rich never really get taxed under socialism.
And so eventually what it does is it forces the middle class into poverty.
And so you have this two-tiered system.
Socialism is a two-tiered system.
Capitalism, if it's worked well, is a many-tiered system where there are people all up and down the scale.
So the only question to me is, since I believe that Clinton is slightly more of a socialist than Trump, although Trump will not reform entitlements, the only question was, did I have to choose?
And this is the argument that Ben and I have been having behind the scenes and Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire and I have been having behind the scenes, where is it truly a binary choice where if you don't choose Trump, you are choosing Hillary.
And I wrestled with this question because I'm a simple guy.
I look forward to, it looks to me like I'm a conservative vote.
If that conservative vote doesn't go to the conservative, it's going to the liberal.
Essentially, it's giving a vote to the liberal.
So I think there is sense to that.
I felt, I feel that this country, to which I owe everything, I have two ways that I love this country.
I love this country in a high, noble way for what it stands for, the Republican values, the limited government, the individual freedom.
These are the things that I love it for at a high level.
And when it betrays those things or abandons those things, I love it less because it no longer represents what I love as the principles.
And when it doesn't represent those principles, I love the country less.
But I also love the country the way you love your mother.
You know, you love your mother whether she drinks, whether she's annoying.
You love her because she bore you, because she made you who you are, because she raised you.
This country did all that for me.
And by the way, happened to do it during the 50 greatest years of human history.
So I was there for the 50 most peaceful, most prosperous, most fair, most just years in all of human history, all of human history from its beginning to this moment I lived through.
And I'm insanely grateful to America for that.
And so when it asks me to make a choice, even though it's a choice that I find awful, I find this to be an awful choice, I got to make it.
I have to make it.
If I decide that Hillary and Trump are just as bad, then I don't have to make it.
Then I can vote for a third candidate because what difference does it make?
But it seems to me that Trump is clearly, clearly better than Hillary Clinton.
I believe that after all the panic is over, I believe Trump will be a mediocre middle-of-the-road political, politically middle-of-the-road president who will do a couple of things that'll make us all cringe, where we'll all go like, ooh, did he really say that in the office of the presidency?
Then he'll be gone.
He's 70 years old.
He's not going to be around forever.
I think he'll be a kind of middle-of-the-road president.
He'll stumble around, but he'll be fine.
Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, lying, cheating, anti-constitutional bully who has announced that she wants to destroy the First and Second Amendments.
She has said that she wants to destroy the First and Second Amendments.
When people say that she's not as corrupt as Richard Nixon, that her corruption, her scandals are not as bad as Watergate, I think that's absurd because what they're not factoring in is they're not factoring in the ideological corruption that Barack Obama has already imposed on the IRS, on the Justice Department, on all the organs of government that Obama has corrupted to become purely leftists, purely political organs instead of the organs of justice and fairness that they are supposed to be.
So she'll be walking into this machine and taking it over and adding her own money corruptness, which Obama doesn't seem to be money corrupt.
She'll be adding her own greedy, selfish money corruptness to the corrupt system that's already in place.
You know, people say, well, it's not as bad as Watergate because people lost their jobs and went to prison over Watergate.
The fact that people haven't lost their jobs and gone to prison over the IRS scandal is part of the scandal.
Part of the scandal is our press, which remember was after Nixon, but has turned a blind eye, has seen no evil, to is basically decided to see no evil with the first black president, hallelujah.
So, you know, to me, it seems easy to say that Trump is the better choice.
And we will talk about this more and look at the closing arguments, but first we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
So you've got to come on over to the Daily Wire to hear the sensational rest.
Clinton's Final Argument00:05:47
What's that?
Oh, and tonight and come tonight and hear the, of course, hear our fantastic, amazing drunken election coverage.
It's going to be drunken if I have anything to do with it.
That's for sure.
Hooray.
All right.
You know, my friend Bill Whittle put out a really funny video, which you should take a look at.
We'll just play a little bit where he takes Trump out of the equation in making the judgment.
Well, needless to say, Donald Trump has been a polarizing figure in the 2016 election.
Many conservatives and most undecided voters have serious concerns about Trump as a candidate.
So why don't we clarify things a bit by removing Donald Trump from this head-to-head election lineup and replace him with a turnip.
So who's better qualified to be the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton or a turnip?
Well, first, let's look at the similarities.
Since it's a root vegetable, most of the turnip remains out of sight, covered over by soil.
Since she's a pathological liar, most of Hillary Clinton's activities also remain out of sight, covered over by the progressives in the news media.
Like its cousin, the Rutabaga, the turnip contains bitter cyanoglucosides that actually release small doses of cyanide.
No one knows for certain how many doses of cyanide Hillary Clinton has released.
Now, the 1881 Household Cyclopedia states that the benefits derived from turnip husbandry are of great magnitude.
Multiple sources confirm that the sexual assaults and actual rapes of Hillary Clinton's husbandry are also of great magnitude.
And finally, neither the turnip nor Hillary Clinton can climb a flight of stairs unaided.
So I cracked up when I saw this and I emailed Bill and I said, it's too bad the turnip isn't running.
It would be much easier, much easier choice.
All right, let's take a look at the closing arguments.
Here's Donald Trump's final ad where he makes his closing argument for why Trump.
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.
The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election.
For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interest, they partner with these people that don't have your good in mind.
The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry.
The political establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories and our jobs as they flee to Mexico, China, and other countries all around the world.
It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.
The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you.
So the one thing I just want to point out about this ad is that in terms of content, in terms of actual political content, it could be a Bernie Sanders ad.
I mean, he doesn't say, you know, there's nothing to say how this is going to be broken.
Okay, we know who the enemy is.
It's the globalists and they're all plotting against us and they've taken our jobs away and all this stuff.
But what's the answer?
I mean, Trump has always been like this.
He has always been great at saying, well, here's the problem.
Here's what's annoying you.
Here's the thing.
Here's the thorn in your side, you know, that's bothering you.
And you go, yeah, And then it's like, I'm going to fix, only I can fix and everything is going to be great.
It's an empty promise, which just tells us, it just tells us that he is the avatar of our anger, the incarnation of our anger, not the incarnation of our solutions.
And that's what makes conservatives like me so crazy.
That's why we can't come out and say to you, yes, you know, Donald MAGA, make America great again.
We can't do it because we haven't seen it.
Maybe he will.
Maybe, you know, I've seen people rise to the offices that they take.
The presidency is a great office.
Maybe he'll rise to that office.
You know, he just hasn't shown, he has not shown the capability of doing that.
Let's take a look at Clinton's final argument.
I think we can all agree it's been a long campaign.
But tomorrow, you get to pick our next president.
So here are a few things that I hope you'll think about.
First, it's not just my name and my opponent's name on the ballot.
It's the kind of country we want for our children and grandchildren.
Is America dark and divisive or hopeful and inclusive?
Our core values are being tested in this election.
But everywhere I go, people are refusing to be defined by fear and division.
Look, we all know we've come through some hard economic times and we've seen some pretty big changes.
But I believe in our people.
I love this country.
And I'm convinced our best days are still ahead of us if we reach for them together.
I want to be a president for all Americans, not just those who support me in this election, for everyone.
Because we all have a role to play in building a stronger, fairer America.
The second thing I want you to know is this.
I will work my heart out as president to make life better for you and your family.
Working for Children and Families00:02:56
We won't always get it right, but you can count on this.
I've never quit, and I never will.
I'll get up every day determined to keep America safe and strong and make our economy work for everyone, not just those at the top.
And finally, working for children and families has been the cause of my life.
You can turn her off.
Enough is enough.
I mean, the thing is, it doesn't matter what comes out of her mouth because she lies just standing there.
She's like a convict.
They say about convicts.
How do you know when a convict is lying?
His mouth is moving.
That's like, that's Hillary Clinton.
You know, there was this thing yesterday.
Did anybody see this?
I couldn't bring it in because the BBC has banned it, has blocked it.
They won't put it on YouTube because they have copyright on it.
But the BBC is doing this beautiful, beautiful show called, I think it's called Planet Earth, or just Earth.
Yeah.
And this is Earth 2, right?
This is the second season.
And the whole point of this is they're using these cameras that can basically look at a nostril hair from like 500 yards away.
So they're taking these moments in animals' lives.
So there was one yesterday of this baby iguana.
Did anybody else see this?
Yeah.
Oh my.
It is so intense.
It was so amazing.
It's this baby iguana on a beach, basically, where there are rocks.
And there are these snakes that I've never seen this before, these snakes that hunt in packs.
And first the snake is going around.
The snake can't see too well, so the baby iguana is standing still.
How he knows to do that, I had no idea.
He just figures, if I can just stand here, he won't see it.
But finally, the snake kind of bumps into him and he takes off.
And out of the rocks, like a zombie movie, it really was like a zombie movie.
Out of the rocks, these snakes come pouring like rain.
They just come pouring out of the, chasing this baby iguana, and they catch it and they wrap it around and it breaks out.
It breaks out of these, goes up the rocks.
And as it goes up the rocks, out of the crevices of the rocks, the snakes are coming out and grabbing its argument.
Yes, I swear they're grabbing its legs and it's pulling away.
And finally, unbelievably, it gets to the top of this rock and it gets to its mommy iguana and it gets away.
It really was a scene out of a horror movie.
It really was.
That's Hillary Clinton with the law.
Just thinking, like they just can't get her.
You know, she's just too hooked in.
And so when she comes in, she does this thing, you know, like, oh, working together and all this.
You know, she's a criminal.
I mean, it's like, you know, I always, it always kind of bothers me when I hear people, you know, on the comments saying, she should be in jail, she should be in jail.
Because I feel like there's, you know, sometimes I don't even know if the people leaving angry comments are actual conservatives or just trolls, you know, trying to make conservatives sound that angry.
But it is true that like anybody else would be in jail, and it is a testimony to how corrupt the government has become that she is not under investigation, that Comey couldn't get a grand jury, that he didn't even try to get a grand jury, that he didn't threaten to quit without a grand jury, and she just skated.
So, you know, anyway, that's her closing argument.
Party Splitting?00:05:51
Well, we're all stronger together, and she's going to be the president of all the people, so no one is safe.
To take a look quickly at the future, I think, you know, right now the polls are really showing Hillary Clinton taking a stronger lead.
If that's true, it means that this election is going to be over this evening, will be over very quickly, and I'll have to get drunk off screen instead of during the program itself.
But, you know, Krauthammer was asked what happens to Trump after the election.
Here's what he says.
But let's assume he loses.
He's not a Michael Dukakis.
He's not walking away.
He's not a Bob Dole who's going to retire.
This is a man who, as he says, created a movement out of nothing.
He basically fashioned a populist faction in the Republican Party, took over the party, at least in this cycle.
And then the question would be, is he going to walk away and go back and become a businessman?
I doubt it.
It's very hard to do.
And the fact is, he will be the power broker.
I see the party as sort of splitting in two, at least in theory.
The populist element that he has now created and mobilized, winning more Republican votes in the primaries than any candidate in history.
He will have won at least 40% somewhere in the 40s of the national electorate.
Yes, he's a force.
The other side, I think, will be led by Paul Ryan, representing the traditional party, the Reaganite party, the wonkish party, programmatic party, and conservative party, which is different from populism.
And if Trump won.
So he's looking forward to a kind of a civil war or a third-party establishment.
And Hannity, I won't play this, running out of time, but Sean Hannity did his whole thing where I blame you, you'd never Trumpers, I blame you if you didn't vote, and all this stuff.
So that anger is going to, it ain't going away.
That whole thing, there's money in it.
There's money in it.
There's fame in it.
There's audience share in it.
And there's votes in it.
And so it's not going to go away.
It's going to be a power for the next four years at least.
You know, I'm tempted to end the political part of this show by reading the famous words from Lincoln's first inaugural address.
Some of the greatest writer who was ever president, Abraham Lincoln.
Here's just these few lines.
We are not enemies, but friends.
We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic cords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.
The only problem with those words, of course, is they were spoken just before the country erupted into the bloodiest civil war in our history, leaving, I think it was 600,000 Americans murdered each other on the fields of battle.
You know, and I hope we're not looking at that, but as I say, I do not think this anger is going away.
You know, I voted for Donald Trump today, but I didn't vote for who he is, and I didn't vote for what he stood for.
I voted against Hillary Clinton.
If tomorrow, if and the day after and the day after, the anger party becomes, the Republican Party becomes the anger party, I'm done.
I will not join that party.
I'm not going to follow, walk down that road.
You know, the whole point to me of conservatism was that there are two programs from the world for the controlling the world.
The world has to have government.
There's two programs for government.
One is love, one is power.
Conservatives are really the party of love, if you think about it.
The conservatives are always saying, yes, you can have capitalism.
You know, the founders, let's start here.
The founders all said the Constitution is a document for a religious people.
And that's usually taken to mean that religion causes you to have inner discipline so you can be free.
The government doesn't have to control you because you have inner discipline.
And I'm sure that's what they did mean.
But it also means something else.
It means that you will act out of Christian love so that you can have capitalism.
Its inequalities will be solved and made better by charity, by love.
You know, women can opt out of the financial realm in order to build a home for people and raise the next generation if they are treated with love, if that profession is treated with respect and elevated and loved.
You know, it doesn't work if there's no love involved.
And it's always capitalism, inequality, the past, the oppression of the past, the slavery and the things that this country has done wrong, as all countries have done wrong things, can be gotten rid of if you stop and go forward in love.
All those things are in love.
The left basically is saying, no, this has to be legislated.
You have to legislate the equality of women.
They want to use power.
You have to legislate fairness by coming, as Crowder said, and taking your money away at gunpoint.
You have to legislate the past.
You have to pay.
We're going to come and take your money and make you pay for the past sins committed by people who aren't even alive anymore.
The thing about love is that it's unreliable.
If people don't act in love, if people don't go to church, if people don't learn the Christian ethos, freedom becomes a lot more difficult.
You have to have liberty but, liberty, but power.
Because power is reliable.
The only problem with power is once you give it to people, it's hard to get it back and they want more and more and more.
And if I solve this problem with a little bit of power, I can solve that problem with a little more, and I can solve all your problems if you give me all the power.
So whether it's the right asking for power to rule the world with power and anger, or whether it's the left means nothing to me.
It means nothing to me.
I am not going to be on the party of who has the most power.
I am going to be in the party who gives the freedom to the people and demands that they act with responsibility and with love.
That's the only way to be free.
Moral Complication In The Quiet Man00:05:14
It's it.
That's it.
There is no other way to be free.
And you may like the way a right-wing tyrant rules better than you like the way a left-wing tyrant rules.
It doesn't make any difference to me.
So I hope as we go forward, there will be a party that represents freedom, because that's the party I'm going to be on.
I have always erred on the side of freedom, and I will continue to err on the side of freedom.
This is a bad day.
This is a bad election day.
I've made no bones about it.
I lost this election the day Donald Trump was nominated.
I voted for him because I think Hillary Clinton is part of a machine, but I ain't happy about it.
And going forward, we're going to have to find a better way for people like me, people who believe in freedom and the Constitution, because otherwise it's just going to be an argument between two kinds of authoritarianism.
Stuff I like.
I wanted to talk a little bit about manhood and the role and the way that manhood is represented.
Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson's film about a conscientious objector who wouldn't touch a rifle in World War II and yet became a hero came out.
And I like this picture.
I won't say that I loved it.
I thought it was kind of corny in places.
I'm really happy that Gibson is back.
I think Mel Gibson was overpunished for a bad thing he did.
You know, it's not just getting drunk and saying nasty things about Jews and women.
You know, he's an alcoholic.
That's too bad.
I feel for him.
He really did, you know, hedge when he was asked if there was a Holocaust, whether he was part of his father's Holocaust-denying church and all this stuff.
But, you know, look, he's an artist with dark parts of his internal world.
The fact that Roman Polanski can drug and sodomize a 13-year-old girl and still win Oscars and still be lauded by the artistic community.
And Mel Gibson has these problems in his heart and is somehow ridden out of town because he loves Jesus, basically.
That's why he was really ostracized.
That's wrong.
And I wanted him to come back.
I wanted the picture to do well.
The picture is not done that well.
And I think the reason for that is they sold it to the evangelical community, but it's incredibly violent.
This is my guess.
I think the evangelical community just didn't want to show up and see people blown to bits.
But there is something else in this picture.
There's something that is a kind of moral complication that's not dealt with in the movie that I think undermines its story.
And it is this fact that when you don't pick up a rifle, you can't defend your fellow man.
When you say you won't do violence, when you say you're a pacifist, somebody else has to do the violence for you.
And so you're not really taking a moral position.
I've always said that pacifism is not a moral position.
It just sounds like a moral position.
And I think that's the inherent thing that people sensed in Hacksaw Ridge.
So what I'd like to take is a look at a great, great movie, one of the truly greatest movies ever made, called The Quiet Man with John Wayne, which takes another position toward violence.
The Quiet Man, 1952, directed by John Ford.
John Wayne plays a boxer who has accidentally killed a man in the ring and has decided he will never fight again.
And he moves to Ireland to get away from America, and he immediately meets Ward Bond, who plays this belligerent, nasty landowner, and he buys a piece of land that Ward Bond likes, and he begins flirting with Bond's sister, Maureen O'Hara.
And here's a scene where Bond confronts John Wayne, who does not want to fight, and Bond is just as big as he is, and he doesn't want to fight, and Bond confronts him in a pup.
Neighbors!
Oh, neighbors!
Never!
And if I so much as catch you putting a wet foot on my property, I'll, I, and, oh, another thing.
You keep away from my sister, Mary Kate.
She's not for the likes of you.
Where I come from, we don't talk about our women folk in saloons.
You sort of make a habit of it.
This morning it was Widow Talan.
Waxad, that's true.
It's a shame you should be.
Speed up.
I'm not accusing Mary Kate.
It's him.
Why, this very moment.
Let him deny it if he can.
At the back of the chapel, he took liberties that he shouldn't have.
I said good morning to her.
Good morning.
Yes, but it was good night you had on your mind.
That's a lie.
That's a what?
I said that's a lie.
That's the word I take from Newman.
Put up your fist!
I'm not gonna fight you, Dick.
So he gets out of the fight there, but when he falls in love with his sister Maureen O'Hara, and I have to say, John Wayne was never very good at a screen kiss, but this has one of the greatest screen kisses in movie history.
This is really, he made up for all the clunky scenes he played with women in this one incredible romantic scene with Maureen O'Hara.
Suddenly, there's stakes, and suddenly the question of how you can get out of a fight when there's no getting out of it becomes the issue.
And it says a lot more about what men have to do and where men have to take a stand than Hacksaw Ridge, which does show that a man can be brave without committing violence, but it doesn't answer the moral complexities the way this picture, The Quiet Man, does.
It's a great movie, by the way.
It's just incredibly entertaining every minute of the way.
And you should watch it.
The Quiet Man's Moral Complexity00:00:23
All right, we're going to be, the show is over for now, but we're going to be back.
When do we start?
About 3.30 California time?
About 3.30 California time?
I will be here.
Ben will be here.
Jeremy Boring.
And we have a real good list of guests who were attracted to the alcohol, basically.