Andrew Clavin mocks parents fearing Trump’s presidency over racism and climate change, dismissing concerns as irrational while praising his transition team—Reince Priebus for pragmatism, Steve Bannon for alt-right influence—and Trump’s 60 Minutes stance on immigration and healthcare. He blames Obama-era policies for Democratic losses, mocks anti-Trump protesters in LA, and slams media bias, calling the NYT a "leftist zombie." The episode pivots to Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, hailed as a post-Soviet masterpiece exposing lost idealism under authoritarianism, before teasing a "Clavin week" ahead. [Automatically generated summary]
In the wake of Donald Trump's election, many Democrats have been writing to me to ask, what should we tell our children?
Today, in a special edition of the mailbag, I'd like to answer some of those letters.
Here's one from the offices of the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Dear Mr. Clavin, ever since Election Day, my eight-year-old daughter can't sleep at night.
When I asked her why, she turned her big, adorable eyes at me and said, Daddy, I'm afraid because all the people who supported Donald Trump are racists and sexists who would kill my little black friends if I had any.
What should I tell my daughter?
Signed, Sleepless in Manhattan.
Dear Sleepless, just sit your daughter down and say, honey, I thought I told you not to read Daddy's newspaper.
All those things Daddy wrote about Trump voters, those aren't true.
Daddy was just writing silly stuff to make people believe what he wanted them to believe.
So there's really nothing to be afraid of, except the fact that your daddy is a manipulative liar.
But mommy already told you that, and you only have to see daddy every other weekend now, so it's not so bad.
Here's another letter from Trembling with Rage in Los Angeles.
Dear Andrew, my eight-year-old transgender son cries himself to sleep every night.
When I asked him why, he said, Mommy, now that Donald Trump is elected, I'm afraid I'll hit my head on a glass ceiling and die.
What should I tell him?
Dear Trembling, you should be able to calm your son's fears by saying something like, sweetheart, remember when I made you wear a dress and told you that boys were disgusting and I really wanted a daughter?
So it would be okay if we just pretended you were a girl?
Well, you're not really a girl, so you don't have to worry about a glass ceiling.
You only have to worry about becoming a psychopath with me for your mother.
Here's one more letter.
Dear Mr. Clavin, my eight-year-old son has been drinking himself to sleep every night and then waking up screaming that his room is filled with lizards.
When I asked him what was troubling him, he said, Mommy, I'm scared because when Donald Trump is president, there will be global warming and we're all going to die.
How can I calm his little fears?
Sincerely terrified in Oregon.
Dear Terrified, just say, don't be silly, darling.
You don't see mommy and daddy lying awake at night worrying about global warming, and there's a very good reason for that.
The climate doesn't change because of anything the president does.
The earth is just a random rock spiraling into the sun where it will ultimately be destroyed, leaving no trace of humankind or its works and revealing all life to be meaningless.
So there's nothing to worry about.
Now, stop being such a crybaby about Donald Trump's presidency, you spoiled little brat, before I really give you something to cry about.
And that goes for all the other Democrats.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
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.
Have you noticed that they're all eight-year-olds old in these stories?
We read these Twitter accounts like every single one.
And my eight-year-old is, it's got to be the same person, right?
The same account is sending them all out there.
All right, we have it.
It's going to be a big show.
We have cultural correspondent Michael Knowles was out among the Trumpian, the anti-Trump protesters this weekend.
And so we'll hear from him on satellite from the desk right next to me.
And he won't be wearing a dress, or if he is, we'll know the reason why, by golly.
I'll do my review of Arrival with no spoilers.
And a lot more, it was a tough Clavenless weekend, although it wasn't a Clavenless weekend for everybody.
Joe Congden staved off the Clavenless weekend by reading my book, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
And he said that the experience was like this.
He sent, tweeted this meme.
Do we have this?
There it is.
Yoko Ono's Reaction00:02:16
It's me.
You can't see it.
It's me as the ancient one played by Tilda Swinton, knocking Benedict Cumberbatch's soul out of his body while clutching my book.
He said that was the effect the book had on him.
So that's my legacy to mankind is I will get to be played by Tilda Swinton in the movie of my life.
Otherwise, though, for the rest of you who didn't read the book, shame on you.
The rest of you read Leonard Cohen died.
Robert Vaughan from The Man from Uncle, the original Man from Uncle died.
And Saturday Night Live, I would say that it jumped the shark, but I think it was more like it tried to jump the shark and then fell and the shark devoured it.
This is their reaction there.
You know, they do those cold openings and they're usually pretty funny.
And this was their cold, open reaction to Donald Trump's victory with Catherine McKinnon as Hillary Clinton.
Heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord.
But you don't really care for music, do you?
Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, and the major lift.
The baffled king composing.
Hallelujah.
And that was it.
There was no punchline.
It was just so, it was so sad.
It was so sad.
I think Yoko Ono said it best.
Here's Yoko Ono's reaction to Donald Trump's election.
You made celebrities sad, America.
You made our say go.
They break their hearts to entertain you.
They work and sweat to become famous.
And then you made them sad.
What is wrong with you?
Repealed and Replaced00:08:54
All right.
So it's now we're in the phase where we start to try and read the tea leaves of what Donald Trump is actually going to do.
You know, instead of like just complaining about the fact that he's there or cheering the fact that he's there, we're trying to look ahead.
And the funny thing is, is, of course, all the people who are looking into the future are the same people who got everything wrong.
They're the same people who are like on, like as Donald Trump was being elected, we're saying Donald Trump will never be elected.
So basically, you now have people playing, you know, six-dimensional chess who just lost the game of Candyland.
You know, they lost it when it was easy.
They couldn't tell you what the future was five minutes from now, but now they're going to tell you what the future is for the next couple of years.
So I have to say that the signals from Donald Trump distinctly mixed.
You have to, you know, there's no other way to put it.
He just appointed Reince Priebus as his chief of staff.
Mr. Inside, Paul Ryan's pal, a guy who can go to Congress and negotiate and talk to them.
And then he puts Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, which was the Karl Rove position.
It's really like a non-defined position.
Now, I know Steve.
I've met him several times, and I've said this before.
He has always been, he has never been anything but gracious and kind to me, really.
He's always been very pleasant.
We've had a couple of very pleasant conversations.
Obviously, not so much with Ben.
Ben have had a massive falling out, and Ben has written about him and said a lot of things about him.
What we've decided here on the Andrew Clavin show is that now that Steve has power, we just have to throw Shapiro under the bus.
I think that's it.
It's like all this integrity and principles and friendship.
Those are fine until somebody gets hurt and then we're done.
I'm going to take a tip, a little tip from Barack Obama.
I'm just going to be like Shapiro.
He was just a guy in the neighborhood, you know?
Like Jeremiah Wright.
Yeah, I came to the Daily Wire every day, but he never said anything controversial when I was around.
It's like, yeah, he won't be part of my administration.
Anyway, it's very tough because Bannon, just tough to parse what's going on because Priebus, as I say, is Mr. Inside.
Bannon, not so much.
He has been this ferocious, alt-right crusader.
Basically, he has said, I want to burn it all down, Republicans, Democrats.
There is not a lot of compromise from him.
The only thing I'll say from a positive note, and I want to say with these positive notes, over the weekend, you know, those cardboard rolls that paper towels come in, you know?
Over the weekend, my wife struck me with one of these.
She hit me and said, stop being optimistic.
The only guy, the only husband, the only husband in history to be abused, to suffer spousal abuse for being too jolly, you know?
But honey, I'm happy because I'm going to heaven.
I'll send you to heaven.
Anyway, so, but I do, to take the most optimistic view of this, they'll balance each other out, obviously.
You know, one of the things about Trump is that if you're nice to him, and Obama knows this, Obama's being very nice to him, if you're nice to him, he likes you.
This is a thing, and he doesn't really distinguish between people.
This is the way he seemed during the election and certainly during the primaries.
He doesn't distinguish between people and policies.
So now suddenly, these asked, well, are you going to really appoint a special prosecutor to go after the Clintons?
No, they're nice people.
I don't want to hurt them.
It's all very personal with him.
So maybe between Priebus making deals with Ryan and Bannon sitting on his shoulder screaming for the alt-right, maybe we'll find some kind of way forward that'll keep him on the right-wing path, which is what we are looking for.
So he went on, Trump went on 60 Minutes and just, well, it wasn't quite as bad as the press reported it.
But the press's job now is to say to Donald Trump, like, aren't you going to be nice?
Aren't you going to be nice to the Democrats?
Please be nice.
They're actually asking, she actually asked him at one point, who is this, Leslie Stahl.
She actually asked him at one point, what are you going to do about all these violent protesters?
As if they were his violent protesters.
They're her violent protesters.
They're Democrat violent protesters.
But then she asked him, what about all this tough talk on immigration?
Here's his response on the deportations.
Are you really going to build a wall?
Yes.
They're talking about a fence in the Republican Congress.
Would you accept a fence?
For certain areas I would, but certain areas the wall is more appropriate.
I'm very good at this.
It's called construction.
So part wall, part fence?
Yeah, it could be some fencing.
What about the pledge to deport millions and millions of undocumented immigrants?
What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers.
We have a lot of these people, probably 2 million.
It could even be 3 million.
We're getting them out of our country or we're going to incarcerate.
But we're getting them out of our country.
They're here illegally.
After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we're going to make a determination on the people that you're talking about who are terrific people.
They're terrific people.
But we're going to make a determination at that.
But before we make that determination, lastly, it's very important.
We want to secure our border.
So to give the devil his due, Obama has been very carefully, has been very good at deporting criminals.
He has been trying very hard.
He only wants the Democrat voters to come in.
He doesn't want the criminals.
He has been sending them back.
But you heard on this show months and months and months ago, if not a year ago, that every Republican would do the same thing, which was secure the border and then find some way of gracefully letting people who are here already stay.
And Trump is, that's what he's saying.
So really, he's not, you know, he's doing exactly, he's doing exactly what I told you he was going to do.
I'm not sure he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do.
The deportation force is apparently off the table.
As of course it is, because no matter how angry you are about illegal immigration, you are not going to want to turn on your television and watch people, families torn apart.
You're just not going to want to do it.
I know you think you are, but you ain't.
You know, it's just not.
And he's not going to do it.
So, but, but enforcement, as I've always said, you can't have the discussion if the border is open.
You can't keep talking as long as people are streaming across the border at will.
You have to close the border.
So he says he's going to do that.
Wall offense.
What difference does it make?
As long as there's enforcement.
If it's E-Verify, whatever he does, it's going to be better than what's been going on.
I was a little bit more worried about his answer about Obamacare, because remember, repeal and replace Obamacare.
And he has in the past made noise about government health care.
Here is his answer on that.
Let me ask you about Obamacare, which you say you're going to repeal and replace.
When you replace it, are you going to make sure that people with pre-conditions are still covering?
Yes, because it happens to be one of the strongest assets.
You're going to keep that.
Also, with the children living with their parents for an extended period, we're going to keep that.
We're going to very much try and keep that.
Adds cost, but it's very much something we're going to try and keep.
And there's going to be a period if you repeal it and before you replace it when millions of people could lose it.
We're going to do it simultaneously.
It'll be just fine.
That's what I do.
I do a good job.
You know, I mean, I know how to do this stuff.
We're going to repeal it and replace it.
And we're not going to have like a two-day period and we're not going to have a two-year period where there's nothing.
It will be repealed and replaced, and we'll know.
And it'll be great health care for much less money.
Just so you know, okay, just so everybody knows, I'm going to put it down right here: the pre-existing conditions, if you force insurers to ensure pre-existing conditions, that is government health care.
Okay, that is government health care.
And the reason is this: insurance is a gamble.
Insurance is saying that the insurance company is betting that you won't get sick before they've taken enough of your money to pay for your illness and more, right?
That's how they make their living.
If you can go to an insurance company and say, I'm already sick, pay for it, they can't make any money.
Somebody is going to have to pay that cost.
It's going to be you, it's going to be the taxpayer.
So when they say pre-existing conditions, they are talking about government health care.
That's why that bothers me.
I mean, what we need, I think, is something more like catastrophic health care for people who can't afford anything more because healthcare, the whole insurance, catastrophic healthcare insurance, because the whole insurance business is simply a protection racket anyway.
So prices would drop if you wonder why things go up.
Anyone who's ever had his car repaired, goes in and the guy says, Do you have insurance?
And you say yes, and he says, Well, it's going to cost you $400.
And you go, oh, no, wait, I'm not insured for this.
It'll cost you $100.
You know, because as long as they don't have to look in the eye of the guy charging, they'll charge them whatever they think the market will bear.
Why The Left Keeps Reacting00:14:42
We've got to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube.
If you were subscribing, you could just watch the whole thing on the dailywire.com.
You could send in letters to the mailbag.
I think if you subscribe for a year, you can still get Ben's terrific novel.
Stop the horn, stop the trumpets.
I'm not finished talking yet.
But since you don't, we have to cut you out and kick you out.
So you're gone.
Now, the one thing we have to say here, no matter what Donald Trump does, the Democratic Party has been smushed.
Okay, the Democratic Party has been smushed, and the media has been smushed.
Here's Kimberly Strassel, our pal, who was on the show.
Hillary Clinton's defeat has left the Democratic Party a smoldering heap.
Its leaders pointing fingers over who or what to blame.
James Comey, Robert Moke, voter suppression, WikiLeaks sexism.
Barely a mention has been made of the man who presided over one of the most epic party meltdowns in the country's history, Barack Obama.
This has been a massive repudiation of Obama and all those people who have been yelling at me that Obama has fundamentally transformed the country.
And I kept saying, no, he hasn't because nothing he did worked and everything is going to have to go away.
Everything he did is going to have to be fixed.
Here it is.
In 2009, the president's first year in office, the Democrats held 257 House seats, a majority that was geographically and politically diverse.
After Tuesday, the figure stands at 193.
Fully one-third of these Democrats come from New York, California, and Massachusetts.
All we have to do is saw off the coasts and they're gone, folks.
We just have to take care of these states.
The story is equally grim for Democrats in the Senate.
In 2009, they held the first filibuster-proof majority since the 1970s.
It evaporated in the wake of Obamacare.
Tuesday's vote was the best chance Democrats will have in years to retake the chamber, and they lost nearly every close race.
When Obama took office, Democrats owned 29 governorships, now 15, with ballots in North Carolina's tight race still being counted.
Democrats controlled 60 of the 99 state legislative chambers in 2010.
Today, it is 30s, cut in half.
Now that Republicans have won the Kentucky State House for the first time in 95 years, Democrats no longer control a single legislative chamber in the South.
The party of the left will hold the governorship and both chambers in precisely five states.
I mean, they have been decimated.
And she goes on to say this isn't to take away from Mr. Trump's supporters or his message, but the numbers above are a reaction to Democratic failure.
My legacy is on the ballot, Mr. Obama said in September in what was the truest statement of the campaign.
And so the reactions from the left keep coming on.
And in that, in light of that, it's not just a Trump victory.
It is a complete repudiation of Barack Obama and his left-wing agenda, which just doesn't work, which is what we were telling you all along.
It's not only anti-freedom, it's not only anti-American.
It does not work.
It doesn't make life better.
So here's a Clinton supporter's reaction, almost a typical one, I would say.
It has to be a joke.
I cannot believe this is happening.
I'm literally about to fing kill myself, and I'm not kidding.
You better fix this right now.
I literally am going to die.
I need an ambulance.
I drink your tears, sweetheart.
They taste so good.
What I love about that, what I love about this is somebody has got to fix this.
It's like, it's reality.
It doesn't fix.
This is the way.
That's the way reality works.
And it's like, somebody's got to do it.
It's not, I'm going to now go out and become an activist and work for my party.
No, it's like somebody, mommy, has to come and fix this for me.
Now, there are some voices on the left, which are, this is really interesting to me.
There are some voices on the left who seem to have heard something.
They seem to have heard in the faint distance a little touch of common sense.
Here's a British commentator, far left.
He's a socialist.
He says if Bernie Sanders had run, he'd have won, which is nonsense.
All this stuff, by the way, about if somebody else had run, like Mitt Romney would have had a bigger victory and all this.
That only holds true until Mitt Romney is the guy running, and then they tear him apart and he starts apologizing for his money and putting women in binders and he falls apart.
Then, you know, it's easy to win when you're just a statistic, right?
So here's a guy named Jonathan Pye, a British commentator, who just went ape on the left, and he's a far lefty.
So listen to what he says.
The left is responsible for this result because the left have now decided that any other opinion, any other way of looking at the world is unacceptable.
We don't debate anymore because the left won the cultural war.
If you're on the right, you're a freak.
You're evil.
You're racist.
You're stupid.
You are a basket of deplorables.
How do you think people are going to vote if you talk to them like that?
When has anyone ever been persuaded by being insulted or labeled?
So now, if you're on the right or even against the prevailing view, you are attacked for raising your opinion.
That's why people wait until they're in the voting booth.
No one's watching anymore.
There's no blame or shame or anything, and you can finally say what you really think.
And that is a powerful thing.
The Tories in charge.
Brexit.
And now Trump and all the polls were wrong.
All of them.
Because when asked, people can't admit what they think.
They can't admit what they think.
They're not allowed to.
The left don't allow them to.
We have made people unable to articulate their position for fear of being shut down.
They're embarrassed to say it.
Every time someone on the left has said, you mustn't say that, they are contributing to this culture.
Well, right.
You know, this is what we told you all along, that Trump, you know, when Trump was rude and when he said grotesque things, things that we here disapproved of, it was obviously obvious that people after years and years, and this is decades now, of political correctness, which is a form of oppression.
It is a form of mental slavery, political correctness, that they wanted to see the chains broken.
And even if it meant not even being polite, they were willing to go there with Trump.
They were willing to ignore it because they wanted to break their mental chains.
Here's Bill Maher.
He says virtually the same thing and also addresses the Islamic thing, which is part of the same thing.
If there's a silver lining this for me personally, it's the two issues I have been on the case of liberals for, and they've been booing me about this for years, and maybe they'll listen.
One is political correctness.
I think I did a show about that for nine years.
You're outrageous with your political correct bullsh ⁇ and it does drive people away and to Islam.
You know, Islam.
They don't, Democrats, there's a terrorist attack, and Democrats' reaction is don't be mean to Muslims instead of how can we solve the problem of blowing up in America.
So the question is, if you have some people on the left who are hearing this, is there going to be a change?
Change in these like, you know, silly celebrities screaming and singing dirges on the air when they're supposed to be entertaining us with comedy.
I mean, spin some plates on a stick for crying out loud before you give me your political point of view because we don't care what your political point of view is.
I mean, that's the whole point.
That's exactly what we were trying to tell you.
Is there going to be a change?
Well, first of all, Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher and Dean Becket, the editor of the New York Times, a former newspaper, wrote a letter to their readers who were just saying to them, you know, instead of telling us what to think, tell us what America thinks.
Cover America.
And they wrote, as we reflect on this week's momentous result and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.
That is to report America and the world honestly without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.
It is also to hold power to account impartially and unflinchingly.
We believe we reported on both candidates fairly.
So the answer is no.
They do not hear it.
They do not see it.
They do not know what they are.
You know what would it look like?
What would it look like for the mainstream media to change?
I'll give you three things right off the top of my head, three things they could do.
No more accusing people of racism without evidence.
If I don't come out and start slurring people and expressing hate, then why not assume that I'm taking my actions for a logical, practical reason, same as you, same as you, that I'm a moral man, same as you, that I have a conscience, same as you.
You should assume it.
When a white cop shoots a black person, that is not evidence of racism.
It's just a happenstance.
Unless you can go back into that white cop's life and find some evidence that he is a racist, that he means to kill black people, if you can find that, good luck to you.
Good luck.
But if you find it, fine.
But if you don't find it, keep your mouth shut.
You should never, ever, ever accuse anybody of anything without proof.
And that goes for large masses of people, too.
So that takes away your argument right away.
Now you have to make an argument for your policies, which don't work.
So good luck.
That's the first thing.
The other thing, hire conservatives.
You keep talking about the fact, oh, our newsroom should look like America.
But all that means is bung in some people who look brown, bung in some women.
It doesn't mean your newsrooms look like America.
Your newsrooms should think like America.
Half.
Half your managers should be conservatives.
Half your journalists should be conservatives.
And it doesn't have to be affirmative action hiring.
It's just a simple matter of housekeeping that if I'm a left winger covering the news and I say something, the right winger next to me argues with me, it wakes me up.
It makes me, it keeps me from having group think.
It keeps me from having confirmation bias, which is what is going on now.
And the other thing is stop using the New York Times for your budget.
A budget is in the newsroom is where your news stories are going to go, where they're going to play, how much space they're going to get.
Stop using the New York Times for a budget.
It is a crap paper.
It is a lousy paper.
And the reason it's a lousy paper is not because it has no good journalists on it, because it's a zombie paper, right?
What used to be a good paper that's now been eaten out by the left virus and is walking around as if it were the New York Times, but is really just a leftist zombie.
That's what the New York Times is.
But stop using it as a budget, you know?
It's like it's just the leftist, it's just leftist reporting.
And the fact that there are good journals, excellent journalists on the New York Times, makes it even worse because they're manipulating their stories to serve their political interests.
Stop using it, make your own budget, or watch Brett Baer and find out how it's done.
We have Michael Knowles choppering in.
You can hear the chopper in the background.
The satellite is bunging up to bring him in to us with crystal clear clarity from the desk next to me.
Michael, our cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, is here.
Where is he?
Oh, come on.
I'm still five feet away.
Nice hat.
Oh, this whole thing?
Yeah, just, did something happen in the last week?
I haven't been here since last Monday.
Is there anything new going on?
You only wear that when you have nothing to wear.
That's right.
So you were actually out there in the lion's den with the Trump prototype.
Where was this?
Where'd you go?
This was in downtown L.A.
I thought I couldn't have had more fun than being here when we were reporting on the election.
I was very wrong.
Going to this, I went down to what is apparently one of the largest anti-Trump rallies in the country, if not the largest so far, with a conspicuous lack of burning down the city, which I was very grateful for.
I have not seen that many white people pretending to speak for racial minorities since the Democrat primary days, actually.
So you've canceled your subscription to the New York Times.
That's right.
That's right.
Okay.
Yeah, so all whites.
Oh, I would say, I'm not even exaggerating, 97% white hippies sort of pouting around.
And it was great because I was looking for it and I couldn't find the largest anti-Trump protest in the country where you think you'd be able to kind of spot that in a smaller part of L.A. When I looked around me, there were all of these confused leftists kind of wandering around with confused signs and not knowing where to go.
Regular life.
You know why they're all white, because the black guys are at home going, you know, I told the pollster I voted for Hillary, but I voted for Trump.
And me too, me too.
Because our cities stink, you know?
He was right.
So what are they doing?
What are they saying?
What do they want?
I wish I could show you more.
I got a lot of video and pictures of this.
It's all so vulgar that I actually can't really show it on the screen.
It is exactly the issue that left-wing alleged comedians have, which is that they mistake the F word for a joke.
And these guys mistake the F word for an argument.
And every single sign had the word on there.
Right.
With the exception of one sign, which was a paper-mâché model of a thing that apparently one ought not to grab.
So I chose not to put that up on.
A paper-mâché model?
It was very big and very horrifying.
You think you just want to stay home with that.
That's right.
There was a great image I saw of a few people carrying signs that said, we resist this new Trumpy and Awful America in Spanish.
And you would think.
You would think it might actually be more effective if you wrote it in English.
Actually, on that point, you know, there was a one moment, there were some Latino people, but mostly it was white people.
There was a group of white and Latino people marching to apparently some indigenous Latin American tribal beat.
And so I heard this, and I just couldn't resist in my undercover Bernie Sanders shirt to throw my hat on and sing George M. Cohan's It's a Grand Old Flag.
We may have.
Did you bring that?
Let's hear it.
It's a grand old flag.
It's a high-flying flag.
And forever and peace if you wave.
It's the emblem of the land I love, the home of the free and the brave.
Every heart beats true for the red, wine, and blue.
It's a grand old.
All right, turning it off.
It's too much.
So did they notice the hat?
You know, these guys are so on another planet that not a single person noticed me wearing my hat.
I was wearing it for probably 20% of this protest, but I had the big Bernie Sanders shirt on, and it just, you know, they're like.
It's cognitive dissonance.
It's cognitive dissonance, you know, it's some version of colorblindedness.
They got very confused with the moving pictures.
I'll tell you, if anyone in this country voted for Donald Trump and was regretting his vote for Donald Trump, I am here to assure you, you have nothing to regret, my friend.
You know, I have to say, they have made me feel so good about my vote.
They really did.
I struggled over it, I thought about it a lot, but they have just made me, it's worth this.
A Beautiful Film to See00:06:02
No matter what happens now, it's been worth it already.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
All right.
Our cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles, a braver man than I am, went out among the anti-Trumpers and came back alive with his Donald Trump hat intact.
I tip my hat to all of you.
Thanks very much, Michael.
All right.
A quick review of Arrival, the new film.
You know, it's one of those things where the pictures move and people speak.
And so really interesting picture.
A really interesting picture.
People are loving it.
And I always feel bad when I like something but don't love it because it sounds like you're tearing it down.
I'm not tearing it down.
It's intelligent.
It's interesting.
Well, let's look at a scene.
It's about a lady played whose name just went out of my mind.
What's her name?
Amy?
Amy Adams.
Thank you.
Great actress, beautiful, beautiful actress.
She plays a woman who studies language, and they're trying to communicate with these aliens.
So they bring her in to talk to the aliens.
and here is the place where she finally decides she really has to make contact.
Louise.
Is that a new symbol?
I can't tell.
Yeah, fine.
Are you okay?
They need to see me.
Take it off your hat, Matthew.
Dr. Banks, are you okay?
You're ready to accammation.
They need to see me.
Dr. Bates, she's walking towards the screen.
Now that's a proper introduction.
You know, there's a movie I could compare this to, but I won't because it would be a spoiler or give things away.
But here's my criticism of it.
An intelligent, interesting film, well acted, beautifully acted.
He's just a terrific actress.
Here's my problem with it.
It was like it reminded me of True Detective.
This is not what I was going to compare it to, but the first season of True Detective, everybody was saying, oh, how great it is.
And I was looking at it and I thought, it's great unless you want a crime story.
Because what's great about it was the time, you know, the time differences, the little speeches that the actors gave, the acting and all this stuff.
But it was as if the guy didn't know how to write a crime story.
There was nothing interesting about the crime.
It didn't hold together.
The solution wasn't interesting.
In the same way here, it's visually uninteresting.
The aliens are completely unoriginal.
They could have come out of H.G. Wells.
You know, they looked like, they did.
They looked like the H.G. Wells story, the invasion story, I forget, War of the Worlds.
And it was just, all the sets are gray.
It takes place in tents.
Amy Adams is a beautiful girl.
They never let her wear anything attractive.
There's one scene where she must have put that in her contract so that people could see she was still beautiful.
They don't give you anything.
There's one human relationship in it between a woman and her child.
And that's it.
Everything else is just like what's going on.
And it's like they resented having to tell you the story.
They thought they were being so smart, they almost resented having to make a science fiction film.
You know, all that is to say, good film.
I didn't think it was a great film, but I did think it was very intelligent and really interesting and worth seeing.
Stuff I like.
Here, it is very rare that I read a modern book that makes it to stuff I like as what I think may actually be a genuine classic.
I'm not sure because it takes about 100 years at least before you know if a book is going to last.
Svetlana Alexevich won the Nobel Prize in 2015.
I'd never heard of her.
I'm just going to be honest, because I don't really care who wins the Nobel Prize.
Like one day it'll get so silly they'll give it to Bob Dylan.
No, that'll never happen.
I'm sorry.
I'm being silly.
But they gave it to Svetlana Alexevich.
And what she is, is she is a Belarusian journalist who created a form of, I won't call it a novel.
It's what they used to call faction, where she would just interview a lot of people and then weave their interviews together into almost this gigantic poem, this epic poem about a single subject.
She wrote a book called Secondhand Time, The Last of the Soviets.
And it's about people who lived through the Soviet Union and their reaction to now being in this kind of gangsterocracy that came after the Soviet Union and all the stuff, all the wars, the tribal wars that broke out after the Soviet Union fell.
And it's just all their voices telling their stories.
It is a large book.
It's hard to read.
It's a thick book.
Although, I have to say, I'm a very slow reader.
So I'm reading this thing for weeks and I get about two-thirds of the way through.
And I said to Shapiro, you've got to read this book.
And he comes in the next day, yeah, I read that book.
This is why we don't like you, Ben.
But it is a wonderful, wonderful book.
I still haven't quite gotten my head around it.
I'm not even sure what its themes are.
All I can tell you is it shows you the devastation wrought by this godless, enslaving system, because all these people had beautiful hopes.
They look back on the Soviet Union, many of them with nostalgia, because it had ideals, it had meaning, it gave their life meaning.
It was just the wrong meaning.
It reminds me of that film Downfall that they're always making fun of, but it's a wonderful film.
people attaching themselves with honor and with courage to the wrong thing, to Adolf Hitler.
This is the same thing.
They attach their yearning for meaning, their yearning for justice.
They hooked that wagon to the wrong star, and this is the devastating aftermath.
It's a beautiful, beautiful piece of writing.
I just want to say that Bella Shayevich was the translator.
Unbelievable translation.
Just so beautiful.
Lana Alexevich, Secondhand Time, The Last of the Soviets, stuff I really like.