Ep. 222 skewers Democrats’ desperate post-election schemes—like a McDonald’s "study group" plotting a barbershop quartet—while dissecting Obama’s final press conference as performative narcissism, from gay marriage to leaked Trump-bashing propaganda. Steve Bannon’s appointment sparks debate: Is he a nationalist or anti-Semitic? The host dismisses identity politics after a Democrat strategist justifies violence against Trump supporters, then contrasts Bannon’s extremism with Priebus’s pragmatism. Ending with Othello, the episode rejects racial reductionism in Shakespeare, warning that political outrage often masks self-serving manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrats are meeting today to discuss their future in the aftermath of an election that reduced the party to a steaming pile of scrap metal and tears.
A study group which includes every Democrat who still holds elective office will gather in the Children's Party section of the McDonald's on Route 90 outside Watertown, Massachusetts, and will pool their remaining Wall Street donations to buy enough happy meals so that every two elected officials can split one between them.
The Democrats plan to discuss how to continue as a political party when virtually every tenet of their philosophy has been rejected by the American electorate.
Some of the suggestions that are on the agenda include a plan to bring together every Democratic governor who has a Democratic legislature in his state to form a barbershop quartet, which would still leave one governor to pass the hat after the show.
The quartet could raise money for future elections by singing such classic fan favorites as Lida Rose, as well as catchy new songs like, We swear we'll tax your neighbor and give you all his money, but please don't vote us out of a job.
Sweet Adeline.
There's also a plan on the table to organize the 190 remaining Democratic congressmen into a smallish soccer league.
This would be a fun way to continue imitating Europeans without all that socialism stuff that no one likes.
Also, if the congressmen aren't allowed to use their hands, the interns will feel safer.
Another suggestion for the Democrats' future is to build a towering stone obelisk to celebrate the Obama administration with Obama actually inside the obelisk so he can't escape and do any more damage to the party.
There's also an idea being floated to take the remaining political power of the party and use it to run a miniature train set or one of those cool electronic cars that you can guide by remote control, although that might also require some D-batteries.
But the big question facing the Democrats is how to sell their ideas to an electorate that has already had eight years of them.
In a recent poll, voters were asked whether they'd prefer more Democrat policies or to have a piece of rebar threaded into the smallest orifice of their bodies and then woven through their internal organs until it emerged from their eyeballs.
82% responded, it depends on what rebar is and how big.
Among those offering suggestions for a way forward will be former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Reed can't attend the meeting personally because he suffered an injury after his chest expander snapped and struck him in the eye, then swung around and hit him on the back of the head, then kicked his legs out from under him and sat on top of him and pounded him in the face until he learned to keep his creepy hands to himself.
Democrat Business As Usual00:15:27
But Reed did issue a statement saying, quote, the Democrat Party can continue to win the hearts of Americans by lying about our intentions, demonizing our opponents, and screwing poor people while cozying up to the rich and ripping off the middle class, unquote.
So basically, it's Democrat business as usual.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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So we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?
This is why we can't have nice presidents.
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So there are certain things on the show, before I get started on the news, there's certain things that I say on the show and in my personal life that people don't like.
And some of them, they're things like this.
When I tell people that anger is the devil's cocaine and they should not play to their anger because it makes them feel righteous and they're not righteous, people get annoyed when I say things like that because they say, no, my anger is a righteous anger and I am righteous.
Anger supplies a sense of virtue to the right in the same way victimhood supplies a sense of virtue to the left.
And since we don't really have any virtue, that's the whole secret of life.
That's the big secret.
We don't really have any virtue.
I always think it's self-deluding to be angry.
And people don't like it when you tell them not to play to their anger because it takes that sense of virtue away.
Same thing during this election.
I kept telling people, reminding people on the air and in my personal life, you don't really know the future.
And if ever an election was going to go differently, I kept saying this over and over again, if ever an election was going to go differently than people said it was, this was the one.
2016 was the one.
Not one person has come up to me and said, wow, thank you for imparting that wisdom.
And the next time, I won't be so certain about what the future will bring.
And the reason is, is people predict the future to overcome a sense of powerlessness and a sense of suspense, which is painful.
So they don't like you telling them that they can't predict the future because that's the very thing they're trying to avoid knowing, right?
So let me just say yet one more thing that people are not going to like.
American political discussions are rife with womanish hysteria.
And when I say womanish, I mean as opposed to feminine.
Feminine, when I think of the word feminine, I think of grace, tenderness, kindness, wisdom, all the things that go along with femininity.
But womanish, I just think this self-dramatizing, self-important hysteria about minor issues.
And the reason people do this, I think, is because it gives them a sense of importance, self-importance, and power.
If we're fighting evil, if we're not just fighting some clown making a stupid policy mistake, then we're important.
It's important.
And this is why I don't use the word evil.
I've written several times that I don't think Obama is evil.
I have opposed virtually everything Obama has done.
I don't think I don't really like him personally.
I'm not part of that 58% or whatever it is that say they like him personally, even if they disagree with him.
I don't like him personally.
I think he's an arrogant fop and an anti-American and self-deluded and a narcissist.
But I don't think he's evil.
And people keep saying, no, he's evil.
You know, there are governments in this country where the police, the police will kick down your door, rape your wife, kill your children, throw you in a pit so deep no one will ever see you again.
That's what evil looks like, happy pants.
It doesn't look like Obamacare.
It doesn't look like some guy passing a bad bill.
So I'm just trying to look at this moment in time before the new president comes into office without hysteria, without self-importance.
And that's what we're going to try to do today.
But first we have to look at Obama himself because he is one of the funniest.
I can never tell with him whether he's self-deluded or working hard to delude the rest of us or if there's a difference.
I don't think, I think maybe the two blend together, you know, that he doesn't, he's such a narcissist that he can't admit that things have gone terribly wrong for his administration.
His administration is basically, thank you for your administration.
Now let us sweep it out the door.
And yesterday, he gives this press conference.
It's hilarious.
Let me, he's talking about the transition.
Play number two.
My team stands ready to accelerate in the next steps that are required to ensure a smooth transition.
And we are going to be staying in touch as we travel.
I remember what it was like when I came in eight years ago.
It is a big challenge.
This office is bigger than any one person.
And that's why ensuring a smooth transition is so important.
It's not something that the Constitution explicitly requires, but it is one of those norms that are vital to a functioning democracy, similar to norms of civility and tolerance and a commitment to reason and facts and analysis.
It's part of what makes this country work.
And as long as I'm president, we are going to uphold those norms and cherish and uphold those ideals.
You mean for the last five minutes of your presidency, now that you've been completely rebuked, this is a guy whose call has compared his opponents to terrorists.
You know, he has just trolled the left.
The inside story is that he has never negotiated, never once negotiated.
He has come to agreements with Congress and then backed away on them.
He has never given in to anything.
He crammed Obamacare.
Remember, there was no Republican votes.
There's never been a bill.
Well, maybe that's not true.
There probably was a bill during the Civil War that had only one party in support of it.
But this had like no part, there's been no bipartisan support.
And suddenly, you know, what he's doing is he's pretending to be the president the press has always pretended him to be.
He's pretending suddenly that he is the keeper of our ideals of civility.
I mean, this arrogant guy who has done nothing.
Remember, we're clinging to our Bibles and we're clinging to our religion.
He has given no quarter to his opponents.
So now he talks about suddenly, and he's also, he is also, at the same time, he may be, on the one hand, he may be deceiving himself, but he's also playing Donald Trump.
He is manipulating, trying to manipulate Donald Trump because he knows that if you like Trump, if you're nice to Trump, Trump will like you.
As Trump said of Putin, Putin says I'm a genius, so now I like Putin.
Here he is talking about reaching out, okay, about reaching across the aisle, how he's going to explain this to Donald Trump.
What I also discussed was the fact that I had been encouraged by his statements on election night about the need for unity and his interest in being the president for all people and that how he staffs the first steps he takes, the first impressions he makes, the reset that can happen after an election, all those things are important and should be thought about.
And I think it's important to give him the room and the space to do that.
It takes time to put that together.
But I emphasize to him that, look, in an election like this that was so hotly contested and so divided, gestures matter and how he reaches out to groups that he signals his interest in their issues or concerns.
I think those are the kinds of things that can set a tone that will help move things forward once he's actually taken office.
You know what I love about this?
Let me just remind you, this is the president who, after the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage was written into the Constitution, that Jefferson and Madison wrote gay marriage, they said, no, we must have, homosexuals must be allowed to marry.
That was what they were talking about.
After the Supreme Court decided that that was in the Constitution.
Now, this was, whatever you feel about this, no matter how you feel, what side you take about this, it was a hard-fought, divisive, divisive issue between people that touched their religious convictions, their deepest convictions.
This is the president who bathed the White House in a rainbow flag, telling 50% of the country that that was no longer their house.
That in order to be loving, in order to be an official good person, you had to agree with this.
And the president was telling you to get stuffed if you didn't.
And this was a president who, like two years before, had himself not agreed or pretended not to agree with gay marriage.
So this is one of the, you know, you know what he reminds me of?
He walks into this.
He's talking as if he had nothing to do with this divided nation.
He talks like Laertes and Hamlet.
Remember at the end of Hamlet, everybody's lying dead on the stage.
Every character is lying dead on the stage.
And Laertes comes back from the war and he's like, what?
What happened?
Everybody's dead.
You know, it's like Obama hasn't been here for eight years.
What happened?
Everybody's yelling at one another.
It's like, you know, why is everyone so divided?
I hope Donald Trump won't contribute to that.
Give me a break.
Give me a break.
Did you just land on this planet?
It's ridiculous.
It is absolutely ridiculous.
And the press is baiting him, is begging him to attack, for instance, to attack the appointment of Steve Bannon as Trump's chief strategist.
This has been very, we'll go into this in a minute.
But Obama won't even touch it.
Obama says he's not going to talk about it.
He says, do I have concerns?
Yes, I have concerns.
Let's listen to this.
The people have spoken.
Donald Trump will be the next president, the 45th president of the United States.
And it will be up to him to set up a team that he thinks will serve him well and reflect his policies.
And those who didn't vote for him have to recognize that that's how democracy works.
That's how this system operates.
When I won, there were a number of people who didn't like me and didn't like what I stood for.
And, you know, I think that whenever you've got an incoming president of the other side, particularly in a bitter election like this, it takes a while for people to reconcile themselves with that new reality.
Hopefully it's a reminder that elections matter and voting counts.
And so, you know, I don't know how many times we have to relearn this lesson because we ended up having 43% of the country not voting who were eligible to vote.
But it makes a difference.
And by the way, in case you're falling for any of this, meanwhile, his team, his team is slipping source material to the press saying, oh, we really have to hold Trump's hand.
They don't know what they're doing.
You know, the Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday.
Oh, Trump, we had to explain to Trump that he has to hire staff before he takes office.
As if, you know, as if, really.
I mean, this is garbage.
The fact that the Wall Street Journal reported this, it just shows how well they're being conned by these people.
They're very condescending and all this stuff.
Just absolutely ridiculous.
Krauthammer said, I think the best thing, actually, before I get to that, I'm going to have to say goodbye to people on Facebook.
If you're on Facebook, have we actually had, yay, hooray!
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So I like Krauthammer got this right.
Kratheimer is a psychiatrist and was trained as a psychiatrist, and he says this is just a case of pure denial.
It was quite remarkable.
I'm not sure whether he believes it or not, but I think he's trying to talk himself into it because this is the demolition of eight years.
There's a guy who saw himself as a Reagan who would revolutionize the zeitgeist the way that Reagan inaugurated three decades of conservatism.
He was going to inaugurate a new liberal era, and it is falling apart.
Isn't only the policies, but the discrediting of his ideology, the fact that it was so widely rejected, and also the fact that he decimated his party.
So let's look at that.
I mean, that really is.
It was a remarkable press conference.
It was just utter show, utter pretense, utter fantasy.
It was a fantasy.
It was like Obama acting out a fantasy.
And I think the thing is, is that Obama is like a lot of narcissists, there are a lot of narcissists in show business.
And the reason that works so well is that narcissists are really good at including you in their fantasy so that you start to worry about their problems.
I've seen this a million times with narcissists I like and narcissists I don't like, where people will start to discuss with you these other people's problems.
And you go, what do you care?
That's their problem.
Deal with your problems.
But narcissists draw you in.
And that's what Obama is both trying to do, I think, both to himself and to us, is draw us into this fantasy that he has been a unifying, wonderful president.
He doesn't know where this division just dropped out of the sky on the country.
Who knows where that came from?
And now we're going to be civil the way he has always been civil because he hasn't caused any of these problems.
Total baloney, complete malarkey, and complete fantasy.
Meanwhile, of course, let me just remind you of this, okay?
Valerie Jarrett is his chief, I can't remember what his senior advisor, his senior advisor.
Valerie Jarrett has longtime connections to communists.
Her family was communist.
She's been connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Her family had strong ties to that guy, Marshall, Frank Marshall Davis, who was a big Obama mentor and a Communist Party member.
And she has been his senior advisor.
This is what Valerie Jarrett, and Valerie Jarrett has this reputation of letting nobody get close to Obama.
This is what Valerie Jarrett once said about Barack Obama.
He knows exactly how smart he is.
I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually.
Ben's Concerns About Bannon00:08:57
So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit, but someone with extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy.
He's been bored to death his whole life.
He's just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.
This is his advisor.
You think a person who thinks about you like this is ever saying, no, you're doing it wrong, Barack?
No.
I mean, he's got this guy sitting on his shoulder going, you're so good, you're so smart, everything you do is good.
So now he's got this communist advisor on his shoulders telling him he's wonderful, and now Trump wants Steve Bannon sitting on his shoulder.
Here's the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Their op-ed on this is: turn on the hate, Steve Bannon, at the White House.
Anyone holding out hope that Donald Trump would govern as a uniter, that the racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and nativism of his campaign were just poses to pick up votes, should think again.
You have to read this in an ominous sign of what the Trump presidency will actually look like.
The president-elect on Sunday appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, an enormously influential post.
By the way, this op-ed praised Ben Shapiro for opposing Steve Bannon, which I just think Ben should just go and take a shower.
I know Ben opposes him for good and certain reasons.
I went through this because, listen, you know, Ben is a guy I really trust.
Really do, and he reports on things accurately, and he's not a vindictive guy who goes around looking for people to hate on.
He has had, he tells me, experiences.
I've said this again and again.
All my contacts with Bannon have been, he's been incredibly gracious and polite and nice, and we've always just been very friendly.
It hasn't been a deep relationship.
We've just met a couple of times and talked a couple of times, usually about movies, and it's always been fine.
Ben has had experiences with him that some of which have been played out in the press, like the Michelle Fields thing, where they have just really, he has just come away feeling this is really a bad guy.
It doesn't matter to me if he's a bad guy personally, necessarily, as long as I'm not dealing with him.
The question is: is he an anti-Semite?
Is he a nativist?
Is he these things that the Times accused him of?
And so I went, you know, I went through some of this stuff about the Breitbart site.
And, you know, things like, here are some of the worst Breitbart headlines signed off by Trump's new chief strategist.
And it's things like, would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?
Perfectly reasonable question.
I'm not sure.
But the ones that do stand out are like Bill Kristol, Republican spoiler, renegade Jew.
Now that was written, David Horowitz, a renegade Jew himself, has said that he wrote that headline and he wrote the story that goes with it.
He was accusing Bill Kristol of abandoning the Jews by not supporting Trump, but supporting Hillary Clinton and the left, essentially supporting Hillary Clinton and the left.
And so that's what he takes responsibility for that.
The one headline, I mean, there are a lot of headlines.
This is a, you know, a lot of the headlines were Milo Yiannopoulos, who is a provocateur.
I've spoken about this before.
I think Milo makes a mistake.
I think there's a better man in Milo than he lets there be, but he makes a mistake when he plays to this element on the alt-right of anti-Semitism and nativism, thinking it's all ironic, it's all teasing, it's all just blowing up the store.
That stuff can slip very easily into evil.
You know, there was a thing on this, an Ann Applebaum, a terrific journalist for the Washington Post, where one of the writers on Breitbart called her a Polish-Jewish-American elitist.
And when the writer Matthew Termond was challenged on this, he was himself Jewish, and he said, well, you know, why is mentioning one's identity, why is mentioning one's identity racist, you know, for us to do, essentially?
He said, mentioning one's identity isn't racist.
That's essentially what he was saying.
That's not her identity.
Her identity is not being a Polish-Jewish American.
That's not her identity.
I mean, that is the left would say that's her identity.
That's not what we would say, or any decent person would say is her identity.
Ann Applebaum is a spectacular journalist.
She had a lot to do with my coming over to the right, by the way.
When I lived in England, she wrote this article asking a very simple question: why is it all right to wear on your clothing the decoration of a hammer and sickle but not a swastika and i seriously had never thought of that before and it enlightened me to the fact that we can see evil on the right because of the left and the media hates the right but we can't see it On the left, because the media is the left.
And that really alerted me to that.
So I just think that kind of stuff is terrible.
Here is Joel Pollack, one of the Breitbart writers.
He went on Don Lemon.
Don Lemon asked him about Bannon.
Here's his response.
Who is the real Steve Bannon?
Is he an anti-Semite, a white nationalist, a misogynist, as many believe?
Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that Steve Bannon is a national hero.
Because of Steve Bannon and Kelly Ann, they saved Donald Trump's campaign and they helped him win the White House.
And as a result of that, we're going to see Supreme Court appointments of individuals who will uphold the Constitution.
And for that, America owes Steve Bannon a great debt of gratitude.
But no, he's not an anti-Semite.
He is a person who treats all people equally.
You can see I'm an Orthodox Jew, very observant.
I keep the Sabbath.
I keep all the Jewish holidays.
I keep kosher.
Steve and I have worked together in close quarters for four and a half years, and he's always been very sensitive to Jewish concerns.
He's probably the most pro-Israel advisor ever appointed to the White House.
And I have to fact-check Tom Foreman there.
You know, if you're going to report something, you have to get the facts right.
Breitbart News has nothing to do with birtherism, absolutely nothing.
And I can tell you that firsthand because I'm the person who reported on some of that phenomenon, and you have to make sure that you tell your truth about this.
So my take on this is that the Breitbart sites, and Bannon himself said he was like the leader of the alt-right, but he also said that the alt-right, though it attracted anti-Semites, though it attracted racists, was not itself racist and anti-Semitic.
I think Breitbart has played a very dangerous game.
The Breitbart sites have played a very dangerous game.
You do not appease these people.
You do not even give them meat to eat.
You do not even leave them crumbs on the street.
And it has mobilized them.
And if you read the comments in Breitbart, there are a lot of them there.
They feel at home there.
They feel it's a welcoming place.
And Bannon created that.
And I just think that's a mistake.
I think you're playing with fire.
That does not mean Bannon himself is an anti-Semite or an anti-Semite or a white nationalist.
The one thing I will say, though, it is the left who has let this genie out of the bottle in all cases.
I mean, here is, listen to this.
This really got me.
This is Simone Sanders, a Democrat strategist.
And she was asked by, I think this guy, the other guy worked for Bernie Sanders.
And he asks her about this thing that happened where a white man with, I guess, a Trump sticker on his car was pulled out of the car and beaten.
That's alleged.
The fact that he was beaten was on camera.
We saw that.
It's alleged that it was because he was a Trump supporter.
Listen to her response when he brings this up.
I heard is both people on both sides should just cut it all out.
And a hate crime is not the same thing as protesting.
We have to be very deliberate about it.
And what do you say to the people who dragged a poor white guy out of a car and beat him?
Oh my goodness, poor white people.
Please, stop.
Stop it, Carl.
What I say to people that protest is that, first of all, apparently there has never been an acceptable form of protection.
Pardon me, there has never been an acceptable form of protest.
What I'm saying is I am calling for people to be peaceful.
I think protesting is a right.
It is what this country was founded on.
We got this country via protest, actually.
But it's never okay to use violence.
But we can't keep calling for people to be peaceful.
We can't call for people to be peaceful when the rhetoric that has been used is not peaceful, when people don't feel peaceful in their homes.
Let me ask the record.
See, Simone, you need to check your crappiness.
That is a crappy thing to say.
That is being a crappy human being to justify violence.
Oh, the poor white man.
If he was pulled out of a car and beaten, he is a poor white man.
And, you know, this is the thing.
You know, they have made this identity politics a thing.
And Bannon, I think, decided that he was going to blow it up by fighting back on their terms.
I think that's a mistake.
I have said this a million times.
I think there is no excuse for racism.
I think it's an offense to God.
I think people are made in God's image.
When you hate God's image, you hate yourself and him.
And I think it is really, really evil.
Man Seems Strange00:05:54
Let us hope.
But, but, but, again, nothing has happened.
This is what I want to get to.
Nothing has happened.
Steve Bannon has been appointed.
He hasn't done anything.
He hasn't said anything.
There's been no actions that the Trump administration has taken.
On the other side of this, we don't have time to play it right now, but on the other side of this, the far right is going nuts over the appointment of Reince Priebus to chief of staff.
Michael Savage is going, it's as if Jeb Bush won the election.
So everybody's a little hysterical.
That's all I'm saying.
And like, we're going to watch this.
We're going to say what we have to say, but we're not going to pretend that the apocalypse has come when it hasn't.
So far, nothing's happened.
That's my take.
So far, nothing has happened.
Donald Trump, the biggest news is Donald Trump is the president-elect.
That's big news.
So let us go back.
I said every now and again, I'm going to do stuff I like best of all.
Last time I talked about Crime and Punishment, the novel that probably affected me more than anything else.
Today I want to talk about a Shakespeare play, stuff I like best of all, a Shakespeare play, Othello, which in some sense, Othello is, on the one hand, it's kind of a companion piece to Hamlet.
Hamlet is about a guy who is given a task to do, but needs to find absolute proof before he can act and can't find absolute proof because he has lost his sense of reality.
And I've always argued that Hamlet is a statement on the Reformation.
It's a statement on the fact that if the Catholic Church loses its monopoly on the truth, then how will you know what the truth is?
And I say that because Hamlet goes to school where Martin Luther started his campaign that began the Reformation, even though the actual play takes place before the Reformation.
Shakespeare never cared about time or anything like that.
Othello is a play about a guy who is convinced, a Moor who has become a Christian.
He's a converted Moor, converted Muslim who has become a Christian, who is taunted by a guy, Iago, who tries to show him that his beloved wife, Desnemona, a white woman, has betrayed him.
And he gives him totally very bad proof, you know, just kind of little suggestions, and he yet convinces him.
Here is a play.
I think this is a play about race.
I think this is Shakespeare's statement on race, one of his statements on race, the other is The Merchant of Venice.
And it is one of the most complex statements on race in the arts, in the Western arts.
It is a brilliant, brilliant play, and what it says about race is so deep I can't possibly cover it.
Let's just take a look.
Nowadays, Othello is only allowed to be played by a black guy.
Black guys are allowed to play white guys on stage and on screen, but if a white guy plays Othello, that's a sin against humanity.
Here's Lawrence Olivier in Blackface playing Othello, and here's what he's doing.
He is accused of having stolen Desdemona by Desdemona's father.
And he says she would never have run off with a black guy.
She would not have run off with a black guy.
You must have used witchcraft and charmed her.
And Othello responds, no, you asked me, her father asked me to tell the story of my adventures.
And I told the story of my adventures because he's a very brave soldier.
And while I was telling these stories, she fell in love with me.
Here's Olivier.
My story being done, she gave me for my pains a world of sighs.
She swore in faith t'was strange, t'was passing strange.
Twas pitiful.
Twas wondrous pitiful.
She wished she had not heard it.
Yet she wished heaven had made her such a man.
She thanked me.
And bad me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, and that would woo her.
Upon this hint, I speak.
She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
That's great stuff.
It's just strange, is passing strange.
I just love the way he writes.
It's just brilliant.
Who knew that William Shakespeare was such a good writer?
And here's the thing.
Iago now begins to work on Othello's mind to turn him against Desdemona.
And one of the questions literary critics are always asking is, why does Iago do this?
And he always gives different reasons.
He always has a different reason for why he is trying to destroy Othello.
But it's obvious to me that it's race.
He hates him because he's a racist.
He hates him because he's black and he was a Muslim.
And at one point, Iago, who was the most false, betraying fake there is, says a man should be what he seems.
A man should be what he seems.
So here's a guy who is nothing what he seems, saying a man should be what he seems.
In other words, if Othello is a black man, he should act like a black man.
He should be over-passionate.
He should be violent.
He should be cruel to his wife and destroy his wife.
And he turns Othello into the man that he means him to be.
Now, if Othello didn't have that in himself in some place, Iago wouldn't be able to do it.
But until Iago starts working on him, Othello is a noble general.
He's the general of the Venetian army.
He's brave, he's gallant.
You know, he walks in.
When he first walks in, everybody's fighting and he says, put up your swords or the dew will rust them.
He just doesn't, you know, he has absolutely no fear.
No wonder she fell in love with him.
And yet Iago managed to transform him into a bigot's idea of a Moor.
And at the end, when he is facing, when Othello is facing the ruin of himself, his Christian self turns on his Moorish self.
And you can see that he's divided in his soul, but wouldn't have been if Iago hadn't hated him.
Othello's Inner Struggle00:00:49
It is such a complex view of what the Breitbart writer called identity, but what is really just culture and race and blood and hatred, all rolled in together, because we never can separate these things out.
You know, we can't pull any of them apart.
It is the most complex view of race there is.
I always remember as a young man watching James Baldwin, one of the great black activist writers, on the Dick Havitt Show, I was thinking, he said, this is not our play.
This is a play, a white man's play.
And I just like, you're an idiot.
This is a play for everybody because Shakespeare saw into the heart of every human being.
Othello, one of the things I like better than anything.
All right, tomorrow is the mailbag.
Send in your questions.
It's just, it will be such a relief when all your questions are answered.