Ep. 230 dissects Trump’s early presidency through satire, legal loopholes (e.g., his December 15 business exit), and moral skepticism over birtherism and profit-driven policies like Carrier’s Indiana deal. Media bias and populist contrasts with Romney are weighed against Newt Gingrich’s Jacksonian comparisons, while Hollywood’s <10% conservative presence and aspirational storytelling decline—from Four Weddings to rap’s glorified underclass—frame cultural shifts. The host’s 50–60 books/year discipline underscores critical thinking, but the episode pivots from policy to nostalgia for unsanitized wealth in The Thin Man, hinting at broader cultural decay. [Automatically generated summary]
President Barack Obama has been working on his farewell address to the nation, dictating the text to his personal secretary, Lola Vavoom.
In a dramatic exclusive, we here at the Andrew Clavin Show have obtained a copy of the first draft of this speech, thanks to a relationship with Miss Vavoom that is not at all what my wife thinks it is.
Depending on what the meaning of is is, or what the meaning of meaning is, or whether I can climb out of Lola's window before my wife's private detective breaks in.
Here then is an exclusive look at the first draft of Obama's farewell remarks, giving us an insight into how he's assembling his thoughts for his final speech as president.
Quoting now from the document.
My fellow Americans, you lousy SOBs, what do you mean I can't call them SOBs?
Look what they did to me, Lola.
They've ruined everything.
They've turned me into a punchline of a bad joke.
What's black and white and red all over?
My face.
That's what.
Now that this nation of Bible-clinging idiots has humiliated me by electing some orange-haired gorilla to disassemble all of my beautiful achievements.
Damn it, stop crying, Lola.
I can't think with all that blubbering going on.
Just pour me another drink and shut the hell up for once.
Now, where was I?
Oh, yes, after everything I did for these lousy gun-toting rubes, Obamacare, what was that?
Chopped liver?
I mean, I'm not sure exactly what was in it, but it was like free medicine or something.
I give people free medicine, and all I hear for eight years is you said we could keep our doctor, and now we can't keep our doctor.
Well, boo-hoo, play me the world's smallest violin, idiots.
And what about that Paris climate thing, Majig, whatever?
They tell me that baby will keep the sun shining for another thousand years at least.
Could Donald Trump do that?
Hey, bring back that bottle, Lola.
I'm still the president, damn it, and if I want to drink, I will.
Why shouldn't I drink?
I was going to be Lincoln.
I was going to be FDR.
Didn't you see the pictures of me in the magazines dressing me up as great presidents?
I won the Nobel Prize for crying out loud.
Now what am I?
A failed Paluka with a one-way ticket to nowhere.
Hillary would have made me head of the UN.
That's practically like being king of the world.
Instead, I'm going to grow old giving high-falutin speeches to frosty-haired old dowagers who go into raptures about how articulate I am for a black man.
Plus, I'm stuck with Michelle.
Michelle doesn't understand me, not like you understand me, Lola.
Now give me that damn bottle.
All right, all right, I'll finish my farewell speech first.
Farewell, America, and screw you.
You suck.
Love Barack.
How's that?
Now give me another drink.
Unquote.
Guessing the president is still working on a second draft.
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 zippity-zing.
It's a wonderful day, hoorah, hooray, it makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
All right, that was totally our producer, J.A.'s fault.
I used to have something blocking him from my eye line.
Now when he cracks up, he cracks me up.
All right, it's mailbag day.
Yay!
You know, we will take, I have some questions already in, and we will take live questions.
So if you send live questions while we're doing the mailbag, I will try and answer them with answers that are 100% guaranteed correct.
But only if you subscribe.
That's right, you got to subscribe, and it will happen after we cut you off ruthlessly from Facebook and YouTube.
So it's in the second half of the show, so you've got to stick around for that.
It's only a lousy eight bucks a month.
And for that, you get me, you get Shapiro.
I think we come and clean your car and stuff like that.
It's great.
Today also is St. Andrew's Day.
Why Fake News Matters00:15:04
Did you know this?
Yes.
And it's no coincidence that it's also the last sale day for my memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
For one more day, it is on sale as an e-book for three bucks.
But if you spend the whole thing, you can get it as a real book and give it to someone for Christmas, which makes a great Christmas gift.
It can't be a coincidence that it's also St. Andrew's.
That's probably a coincidence.
All right.
So Donald Trump, I've been thinking about this a lot.
Donald Trump tweeted today, sent out a series of tweets.
I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15th to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to, in all caps, make America great again.
While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important as president to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.
Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations.
The presidency is a far more important task.
That was his series of tweets.
Now, this has been actually very important, I think.
This is the first thing that has happened in a while, besides the actual appointments.
There's been a lot of fuss about every little thing, but this is actually important.
He's not saying how he's going to do it.
He's not saying if it's going to be a blind trust.
If his children run it, it's still going to be problems for him.
But this is a thing that is going to be used against him, whether he is doing the wrong thing or not, to slow down his agenda.
Everything he does is going to be, well, did he break the law?
Did he break some ethical things?
You know, Judge Napolitano, the legal expert on Fox, was talking to Megan Kelly about this, and this was his judgment of it as a legal matter.
The problem for President-elect Trump is a political one and not a legal one.
The reason it's not a legal one is that all the ethics rules that the Congress has written and his predecessors have signed into office, regulating everybody that works for the federal government, have two exceptions to them: the vice president and the president.
So none of the rules that govern everyone else govern him.
Stated differently, he can lawfully run the executive branch of the federal government and operate his businesses at the same time.
He can engage in dealing which appears to be a conflict of interest.
And again, the remedy is political.
It's not legal.
Look, he can't break the law.
He can't accept payments from foreign governments in order to confer benefits on them.
And even his wildest critics have not accused him of that.
But if he toes the line, he can probably do what he says he's going to do: be a good businessman and be a great president at the same time.
But what the judge is saying is that when he says the remedies are political, that means constant investigations.
Every decision he makes, did it help him?
Did he do it for the money?
Was he taking emoluments?
The whole thing is just going to slow him down.
And, of course, there's a danger that the nation sinks into kleptocracy.
I mean, the idea that thieves are running the government solely to make a profit, like they do in Russia, basically.
So this is important to me personally because I am constantly watching this president-elect to see how I feel about it.
I was a guy who really did not like Donald Trump.
I do not like the way he behaved during the primaries.
I didn't like the bullying, the little Marco stuff.
I know that stuff was funny and appealing to a lot of people, but it really bugged me.
I don't like people who treat other people like that.
I don't like a president who did it.
Even worse were some of the conspiracy thing, even the thing about Barack Obama's Kenyan birth certificate.
That was funny too, because Obama was kind of trolling the right with it, and Trump trolled him back, and that was kind of funny.
But when he did this stuff about Ted Cruz's father, Why did he know Lee Harvey Oswald, whatever the hell it was from the Inquirer?
It really made me feel like, God, this guy has no morals.
There's nothing containing him.
At the same time, at the same time, I really did understand what the people saw in him because the left has bullied the people so long.
The left, I mean, this is a country in which large swathes of the manufacturing base have disappeared, have gone over to other countries.
People are out of work.
People are on meth.
People's kids are on meth.
People don't work and they don't want to work because they've got enough welfare and they sit around and play video games.
And it's like a country where there's deep, deep problems.
And meanwhile, the president of the United States is talking about transgender kids and which bathroom they can use.
And you're sitting there thinking like, what?
You know, what the hell are you talking?
You know, they're doing all this stuff about fake news.
You know, I hammer the news media all the time because I think it's a much, much, much bigger problem than even the people who attack it do.
I mean, the news media, the mainstream media and its bias is jet fuel to people like Rush Limbaugh.
There wouldn't be a Rush Limbaugh if he didn't have them to debunk all the time.
But it really does skew.
It is like constant, constant bullying, and it skews people by not telling them the truth.
I just found this.
Christiana, I'm a poor journalist who was one of the most biased journalists in the country.
And she gets so upset when anybody calls her biased.
What do you mean?
Pardon me?
Here she is giving a speech about climate change.
Listen to what she says.
We cannot continue the old paradigm.
We cannot, for instance, keep saying, like it was over global warming, when 99.9% of the science, the empirical facts, the evidence, is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.
I learned a long, long time ago when I was covering the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia never to equate victim and aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then, if you do, particularly in situations like that, you are party and accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.
So those of us who oppose, I mean, this is a journalist, right, telling people that no, you cannot be unbiased, you cannot be objective and give play to those of us who think, for instance, I think the world is getting warmer.
It seems the evidence, it hasn't for the last 15, 16 years or so, but it has been getting warmer.
But it's gotten warm before.
After all, the Great Lakes used to be glaciers, you know.
I mean, where was Christian Ann Manpour then to save us, you know, from having Great Lakes?
The world gets warmer and colder.
What those of us who think this is a lot of malarkey are suspicious about is a series of policies that simply enacts the power, the deepest desires, the shopping list of the left with no promise of changing anything about global warming.
None, no science.
There is no science that shows that anything they want to do, the taking over, the taxing on carbon, on fossil-based fuels, the government control over our energy business.
It's all just the left doing its thing to redistribute wealth, to hobble wealthy countries that have gotten wealthy through industry and capitalism, and to give that money to throw it down the pit of countries that have not become wealthy because they don't have capitalism, because they don't have democracy, they don't have the industries that make countries rich.
Most people are poor throughout history.
That is the historical truth.
It's the rare free country and free culture that becomes wealthy.
So we have these people bullying us.
You know, if you don't like transgender, a boy in a dress in your little girl's bathroom, you're a hater.
If you are against global warming, you're as bad as the genocidal killers, you know.
And basically, I feel the people said, you want to bully us?
We've got to bully for you, you know.
I mean, they could have gone with Ted Cruz, who actually was a revolutionary right-winger.
They didn't.
They went with this guy.
And I have a lot of respect.
You know, the thing about the presidency, the president's only one guy.
The presidency is not about the commentariate.
It's not about me.
It's not about whether I'm happy.
It's not about whether I feel good about myself.
It's about whether the people are better off and freer and able to become prosperous if they have the opportunity to become prosperous.
So my question now, asking myself as a guy who didn't like Trump and who is watching him very carefully, is how's he doing?
And I have to admit, kleptocracy is one of my fears with him, that he doesn't have the kind of moral framework to not do it.
So I'm really happy to hear at least what he's saying so far, and I'm going to watch and see how it develops.
It doesn't bother me.
It does not bother me.
Look, I got to be honest, it didn't bother me that Clinton was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky.
If I was married to Hillary Clinton, I'd be having an affair as well.
You know, it bothered me that he was using the Oval Office, but that's another matter altogether.
I'm not the president's daddy.
You know, I'm not here to make sure that he's a nice guy, a jerk who helps the people is absolutely fine with me.
So if the ambassador from Svenlandia comes to visit the president and feels it would be good for him to stay at the Trump Hotel, I don't care.
I really don't care.
But if the decisions that he makes are guided and generated by whether he makes a profit, I very much do care.
That is the way for a nation to collapse.
That's the way nations fall with that kind of corruption at the head of it.
So the fact that he's not doing that is really good to me.
It is really a good sign to me.
I love his appointments.
I'm really happy with his appointments.
And I kind of like what he's doing to the media.
You know, the media has been doing this whole thing about fake news, fake news.
And fake news is basically a way of shutting me up.
They've declared the Daily Wire, one list declared the Daily Wire, a fake news site.
The Washington Free Beacon did a supercut of fake news.
I love this.
Let's just take a listen to some fake news.
And when I say fake news, I mean stories that are designed to trick people into believing lies.
Let's be clear.
Donald Trump will lose the election.
Right now, Donald Trump will lose the election.
I mean, if you look at the Battleground States right now, if Donald Trump's going to lose.
This is different what Donald Trump's doing.
It's sinister.
It reeks of Joe McCarthy.
Texas is still competitive.
Is the election over?
I mean, a lot of political scientists would say at this point, nothing matters.
Day Citibank said if Trump's elected, the market will go down 3 to 5%.
If Donald Trump wins the election, the stock market will take.
And that would hurt the stock market.
If Trump were to win, you know, the stock market would go down.
You know, one of the pillars of the infamous blue wall.
Talking about if she can hold there, that's a key part of that blue wall.
Trump clearly going after that blue wall.
It's whether Hillary Clinton's going to win by a small margin or whether we're going to essentially annihilate Donald Trump.
I think Hillary will win.
Most analysts are saying that Hillary Clinton's going to win in a landslide.
I don't think it's likely that Hillary Clinton will win.
38 or 40 percent of people, roughly speaking, are going to have voted for Trump.
And if Donald Trump does lose, particularly if he loses in the face of a massive turnout from Latino communities.
But there's an invisible surge with the Latinos.
The surge of the Latino vote, that that's going to be enough.
Surge in Hispanic, Latino voting.
This is the number right here we're all going to be talking about after the election.
It is the Hispanic vote, but the surge of Latino voters.
African American voters and Hispanic voters and college-educated white women, especially are coming out in droves.
He claims that the media is lying and that its reporting cannot be believed.
So Donald Trump will lose.
They're the most basic, pure form of fake news.
I love it.
See, this is the thing.
You know, I don't want to die in the cause of Schadenfreude.
I don't want to die just laughing at the left while Donald Trump does something terrible.
You know, on our side, that doesn't help me at all.
It doesn't help the country at all.
We need a free press.
We need a free press.
We need a press to harry the president to speak truth to power.
We don't have that press.
We don't have that press.
The press we have is the enemy of freedom.
An all-Democrat, all dishonest press is the enemy of freedom.
And so when I see Donald Trump send out a tweet about burning the flag and the press goes nuts over it, to me, what Trump is doing, I think what Trump is doing when he says, oh, if you burn the flag, you should lose your citizenship, total nonsense.
But what I think he's doing is he's talking like a guy in a bar.
You know, he's talking like me in a bar.
You know, you burn the flag, you should lose your citizenship.
You know, he's going to have to rein some of that in because he's going to be president.
But still, watching the press go nuts over it is fun.
Hey, we've got to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to the Daily Wire.
And if you subscribe, you can be part of the mailbag.
We will change your life.
And boy, does it need changing.
All right, so let's look at what he's accomplished.
As I said yesterday, I think his appointments have been terrific.
Love Jeff Sessions, his AG, as Attorney General, Betsy DeVos, enemy of the teachers' unions.
One of the biggest problems in this country are teachers' unions.
They are keeping the poor from getting educated, from getting up, from getting out.
And the teachers' unions are one of the biggest constituencies of the Democrat Party, and that is why Barack Obama does things that hurt poor black kids by destroying charter schools, by destroying school choice.
He does that for the unions.
And, you know, people who are black and are poor and people who are white and are poor get screwed.
You know, so bringing in an enemy of those people is a great, great thing.
The guy, Tom Price for Health and Welfare, who knows, already has a plan, Health and Human Services, already has a plan for changing Obamacare.
And of course, the left is absolutely clueless.
I mean, they're clueless.
First of all, they just re-elected, as I'm coming on the air, they just re-elected Nancy Pelosi as the head of the party.
This is a woman who has presided over loss after loss after loss for the Democrats in Congress because she's from San Francisco.
You know, they say this is a divided country as if it were divided 50-50.
It's not.
It is not a divided country that way.
Most people have a lot of common sense, left and right.
We're all kind of around that 50-yard mark, left and right.
And then there are these morons who are talking to us about transgender five-year-olds and are talking about global warming and the catastrophe.
Look, my problem with global warming is if this is the end of the world, I don't want to spend it making Al Gore rich, you know, because that's the only thing they're doing.
All they're doing is making sure that Al Gore can watch the world end from his mansion in Montecito.
You know, that is not important to me.
You know, if it's the end of the world, there's nothing these guys can do about it.
When the earth is tired of us, believe me, when the earth is tired of us, it'll say so long and we'll be gone.
You know, there's nothing we can do about it.
All right, so let's listen to Newt Gingrich.
You know, last night, Trump had dinner with Mitt Romney.
And everybody's making fun of Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney, you know, called Trump all these names, and now he's having dinner with him.
And he came out and made this kind of speech.
We can play it.
He just sort of said, let's hear what he has to say.
Trump's First Moves00:07:00
I've had a wonderful evening with President-elect Trump.
We had another discussion about affairs throughout the world.
And these discussions I've had with him have been enlightening and interesting and engaging.
I've enjoyed them very, very much.
I was also very impressed by the remarks he made on his victory night.
By the way, it's not easy winning.
I know that myself.
He did something I tried to do and was unsuccessful in accomplishing.
He won the general election.
And he continues with a message of inclusion and bringing people together and his vision is something which obviously connected with the American people in a very powerful way.
So all of this stuff, this transition, I mean, there's poor Mitt, you know, kind of humbling himself.
Well, he won, I lost, and all this stuff.
And remember, he wants to be Secretary of State.
I guess he wants to be Secretary of State.
This is the second time he's met with Trump.
I can't help thinking that Trump is just waiting to pull the rug out from under him, but maybe not, maybe not.
I mean, it would be, Trump has shown.
Trump has shown another thing that I really like, he has shown a willingness to work with Paul Ryan by putting Reince Priebus as his chief of staff.
Here's a guy who really knows Ryan well, who can communicate with Ryan, and he's balanced that out with Steve Bannon, public enemy number one, who's a far-right, you know, kind of warrior type.
He's, I don't know, populist right, I guess we'll call him, warrior type.
A lot of people don't like Steve Shapiro among them, you know, but he's every president gets a jerk, gets that guy, that doorkeeper, that nasty guy, and everybody hates him, but he can help the president isolate the president.
That balance, I think, could be a good thing.
That is the happy version of the Bannon-Reintz-Priebus pairing, that one is going to go and work with Congress and the other is going to kind of whisper in Trump's ear to hell with him.
That could be a good balance.
Here is Newt Gingrich, who is an early adopter, an early Trump adopter, talking about what he thinks is going on.
And Newt has been, you know, although Newt has been very, very pro-Trump, he's also been honest.
He hits the guy when, like, for instance, when Trump put out that tweet about, oh, there are millions and millions of illegal votes.
You know, Newt was like, shut up.
You know, no, they're not.
You know, Newt's been pretty right on.
So here he is talking about the Trumpian revolution and what he thinks people aren't seeing.
I don't think any of us have come to grips yet with the fact that the world changed remarkably decisively with this election.
I mean, I think, for example, most Republicans in the city have not yet even begun to come to grips with the fact that potentially, and that's not true yet, but potentially, we just elected somebody totally outside the norm who has the energy and the drive and the intelligence and potentially the skills to profoundly reshape the American government.
None of us have really begun that deep sense of if that's true, how does that change how we approach health care?
How does that change how we approach running the Veterans Administration?
You're an historian.
Is there a president he's akin to?
Is there a president you'd compare him to?
Sure, Jackson.
I mean, when Andrew Jackson got here, having had the election stolen in 1824, in his view, and spending four years beating up the establishment, he came in as a genuine, the most insurgent presidency in American history.
I always tell people that when you watch Trump, you need to recognize he's one-third Andrew Jackson in disruption, one-third Theodore Roosevelt in sheer energy, and one-third P.T. Barnum in selling all the time.
I mean, that's a pretty fair assessment when he compares him to Jackson.
I mean, Jackson was a much more accomplished man in terms of patriotic duty.
He fought off the British at the Battle of New Orleans.
He virtually ended the Indian Wars at the Battle, what was it, Horseshoe Ridge?
Horseshoe Bend, thank you.
So he had a lot more accomplishments, but he came from nothing.
He had sold slaves.
He had done a lot of stuff like that.
And people just were appalled.
The founders, the remaining founders were appalled that the country had devolved from a republic into a democracy so quickly.
However, however, what I'm seeing right now is a lot of symbolism, basically, that the appointment process is being run like the apprentice, and he's putting it out there in the open.
This is making a lot of people who are used to backroom deals very uncomfortable.
He's got this thing, Carrier, in Indiana, the air conditioning company.
He has worked a deal with them.
Let's think about this for just a second, then we'll get to the mailbag.
He's worked a deal with them to keep something like a thousand jobs in Indiana, in America, from going to Mexico.
We don't know what the deal is.
He's going to do a press conference and all this stuff.
Obviously, he can't go around and do that with everybody.
We don't know what the deal is.
But just as symbolism, just thinking about this for a minute, as symbolism, which is an important part of a presidency, he's not thinking about transgender five-year-olds and what bathroom they use.
He's thinking about jobs.
I think that just matters a lot.
I think it matters a lot.
It's like finally somebody is talking about what people really care about.
And if it works, if he pulls off, I don't know yet what his economic plan is really going to look like in total, but if he pulls off an economic revival in this country, if he does what he says he's going to do, if he brings back jobs, this is going to be a revolution and nothing is going to be the same.
The conservative movement, which I love and I'm part of, that's not going to be the same.
The Republican Party, not the same.
If he is successful, everything's going to change.
And people like me are going to have, you know, everybody who said, well, I was predicting disaster, but I'd be glad to be proved wrong, nobody's glad to be proved wrong.
That doesn't happen.
But I will be happy if this thing works.
You know, and that's what we're waiting to see.
So far, I think the guy is doing great.
So far, I think the guy is doing great.
I think the symbolism is great.
I think the tweets are silly, but they game the press, which I think is just so much fun, it's worthwhile.
And I think he's speaking to the people.
He's appointing people who seem to be the people who will do what he said he would do.
I think that's an amazing thing.
I'm going to give him good grades so far.
And I'm watching him.
I've got my eye on the guy.
Because, no, really, he's still the same person.
He's still the same person.
All the things I said about him before are still there.
He may be rising to the occasion, which would be a beautiful, beautiful thing.
If he's not, we'll find out, but we haven't found out yet.
All right, the mailbag.
And if you have.
I was turned up a little loud, boy.
I thought I was in a horror movie.
That was our old friend Lindsay celebrating that fact.
All right.
And if you have questions you want to send in live and you are a subscriber, send them away and we will try and get to them.
Dear, most illustrious, most gracious, most opulent, most extravagant, and powerful Lord Clavin.
I just love it when they get my titles right.
Horrible Things In War00:03:05
In the spirit of capitalism and using my dollars to support causes I agree with, at what point should someone stop supporting Hollywood actors, actresses, non-gendered persons who act, who support causes I disagree with?
Should I stop going to see Matt Damon movies since he supports causes I disagree with?
Absolutely not.
You should absolutely not do that.
You don't have to go to see films that say things that offend you or that make you feel bad or what John Multi says, give you the sucker punch by attacking you in his film.
But if he does a Jason Bourne film that you enjoy or does a movie, look, he's entitled to his opinion.
The whole point of these guys is they're entitled to his opinion.
It's just that their opinion gets magnified.
There's no reason to think Matt Naiman knows any more about politics than you do.
Less, probably.
He's busy pretending to be other people.
He's pretending to be spies.
That's what he does for a living.
He goes out and says, I know I'm going to be a spy.
And we pay attention and we watch him because it's fun and entertaining.
Go to the movies.
Have a good time.
From Jeremiah Peterson, Sir Andrew, the great Lord of SoCal, Duke of Great Neck, and the lands beyond.
We don't want to go through the whole thing.
What do you do on Friday that is more important than shortening the Clavenless weekend?
I write.
I still write.
I write in the afternoons, but on Friday I get to write more, and I'm still working on, I'm working on a new novel.
I'm working on a couple of projects that I'm really excited about.
And that's what I do.
Audrey Gail Johnson.
And, you know, you have to, it's tough love.
It's tough love.
You have to learn to get through the Clavenless weekend on your own.
I can't be with you all the time.
Andrew Audrey Gale Johnson.
Last weekend, you killed Castro.
That was great.
That was great.
She says, I saw a Hacksaw Ridge recently, and now I'm wondering what is the Christian response to war.
Is it justifiable to fight in a war, or is it right to just help in a peaceful way?
Or does it depend on the war itself and whether your side has intervened to correct an injustice?
Yes, all those things.
I mean, I do believe, I mean, the Catholic Church and other churches have ascribed to this, has a just war theory, a long theory of just war, of what a just war is and when you fight a just war.
You know, obviously, war is a horrible, horrible thing.
And the thing about wars is we haven't had one on our soil since the Civil War, basically.
And so you forget the damage that is done to ordinary people, that children get killed, families are destroyed, whole generations of men can be wiped out.
And so I think Christians should be particularly careful to get on the hurrah train and wave the flag and go marching off to things like World War I, where really there's not much point in wiping out a generation of men.
I think we should be a little slower and a little less jingoistic, perhaps.
But when the time for war comes, the moral thing to do with a war is win it.
And I think that sometimes means doing horrible, horrible things.
And I think the idea that we should fight wars with rules of engagement that are so highfalutin and difficult that we can't win is insane.
That doesn't mean we torture people.
It doesn't necessarily mean we firebomb civilians and all this.
But we have to do what it takes to win because winning is the most moral thing we can do.
Why Reading Matters00:08:40
From Larry Estevan, how many words per minute do you read?
What are your reading habits?
How much time during the day do you spend reading?
How can I become a more prolific reader?
This was a big question in my life because I'm a really slow reader.
I was joking the other day about a book that took me weeks to get through this wonderful book, secondhand time, and I recommended it to Shapiro, who's an instantaneous reader like my son is, and he finished it like the next day.
I was like, it's an 800-page book, and I was like, oh my, I'm still plowing my way through it.
I decided at some point that reading was part of my job.
I decided that as a writer, reading is part of my job.
And so I spend a large, you know, at least an hour, but frequently more than that, reading a certain number of pages a day.
I am dogged about it.
I get through about a book a week.
It takes me about a week to finish a book.
And so I read 50 to 60 books a year.
And of course, there's all kinds of other reading, but I believe reading books is really important.
There's just more information in them than other places.
You have to do it.
You've got to discipline yourself to do it.
If you do not read, if you do not read, you can't write.
If you don't read books, you won't be able to think.
You really don't know stuff if you're just gleaning stuff off the internet.
You've got to read books and let somebody develop an entire thought that you live in.
From Marcus, we'll take one more.
We've got a live question from Marcus.
What percentage of Hollywood is made up of closet conservatives?
I guess 10, maybe?
Maybe?
I mean, if that.
And, you know, that's, remember, conservatives are not like, we're not all lockstep.
There's this range of conservatives.
I think there are probably more libertarians in Hollywood than you would see elsewhere.
Hollywood is like the island of broken toys.
You know, we're all such eccentrics and kooks and, you know, everybody has his own sexuality and his 16 wives and stuff like that.
So it tends to make you tolerant when you work in a business like this, which I think is a good thing.
But of those people who are libertarians, you know, I would say I could probably fit in this room the number of high-level Hollywood people who voted for Donald Trump.
Probably get them into this room, which is not true.
And there's this whole system, too, of people who say, you know, say a top showrunner, you guys run a TV show or a producer or a studio head, who will say, hey, you know, let's go out and we'll go to the Obama fundraiser.
And it's up to you to say, you know, you've got to say, no, I'm not going to do that, and never get a job with that guy again.
So there's a lot of pressure, even on people who are conservatives, not to be conservative.
Stuff I like.
All this week, I have been talking about stories, movies that elevate the upper classes, that make the glamour of the upper classes.
And I've been kind of comparing it to some rap songs.
I don't like rap very much.
I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to mince words about it.
I think it's awful stuff.
But I am comparing it to certain rap songs that essentially ask you to admire the lowest common denominator, the gangster, the guy on the street, the guy who can't speak good English, and all this.
And all these stories, a lot of them from the 30s, basically glamorized people in tuxedos, white tie and tail, top hat, white tie and tails.
And that said something.
It said that people in the depths of the Depression, when people were really suffering, instead of envying the rich, were looking up to them and aspiring toward them.
They were making fun of them.
There were also socialist stories elevating workers and all this stuff.
But there's something very beautiful about these stories of the rich being told to people who are suffering.
It makes you think that, hey, you know, they're looking up.
You know, I dealt with this in England.
When I lived in England, the movie industry of England started to come back.
And it started to come back because of stories like Four Weddings and a Funeral that showed what the British call, they would call those the middle classes, because the upper classes in England have titles.
But we would call them the upper classes because they're rich and they don't have to work or they work on glamorous jobs and all this stuff.
So four weddings and a funeral have come out.
And the critics hated it.
That picture had to open in America where it became a hit and then go back to England where they said, why are the Americans watching this picture?
They make movie after movie after movie like My Beautiful Laundrette, like two gay guys in a laundromat, you know, and everybody dies at the end and all this.
And I used to go into meetings there.
They would have me into meetings as a writer and I would say to them, are you guys nuts?
You know, are you guys nuts?
Do you never make a movie with a happy ending?
Do you never make a movie with a glamorous actor in it?
No, no, no, that's not serious.
That's not serious.
And their business tanked again.
It went right back down the drain.
You know, Downton Abbey, you know, Downton Abbey brought that back.
They hate that stuff.
They hate the serious, so-called serious filmmakers hate the stuff with the costumes and going back into the past and all that stuff.
They want to think of themselves as this multicultural and we're the people of the poor and we're socialist and all that.
And their movies stink because of it very often.
And I think like going back and looking at these things, it's interesting because they glamorize a certain segment of society, but they don't sanitize them.
So this brings me to one of my favorite, favorite novels and films, The Thin Man, by Doshel Hammett.
Doshel Hammett was one of the great inventors of the tough guy style, a style that I have worked in a lot of my life.
He wrote The Maltese Falcon, one of the toughest detective stories ever written.
But he also wrote this book, The Thin Man, which was this glamorous story of a husband and wife detective.
The husband is a private detective, and she's a socialite, and they kind of solve crimes together.
And the funny thing about it is if you read the book carefully and watch the movie carefully, they're absolute drunks.
And they just drink through the entire thing.
It's all they do.
And so they went into the movies, and William Powell played the detective, Nick Charles.
The Thin Man was actually the villain in the first book.
And then The Thin Man, people just mistook The Thin Man for the detective.
So then they made a series of movies, The Thin Man Returns, and The Thin Man Does This and The Thin Man Does That.
But actually, the original Thin Man was the villain in the first book.
But the film starred William Powell as Nick Charles and Myrna Loy, who was known as The Perfect Wife.
It was Nora Charles.
She was very tolerant, but also kind of, you know, intelligent and glamorous and all this stuff.
And so they played this kind of husband and wife detective team, and they had this wonderful wire-haired dog, wire-haired terrier, Asta.
In the book, it's a Yorkshire Terrier, I think, but it's different in the book.
But in the movie, it was Asta.
When I tell this story in my memoir, The Great Good Thing, when I first went over to meet my wife's parents, they had a wire-haired fox terrier, and it came up yapping at me.
And I said, oh, Asta.
And her parents, her father was a college professor, were so glad she had finally brought home somebody who had read a book that they accepted me into the family instantly.
One word, four letters, Asta.
That was what I said.
And they thought, oh, my God, this is the best person ever.
And so they were always very, very nice to me, which was great.
Anyway, here's a quick scene.
Asta, Myrna Loy, as Nora Charles, is walking the dog, and the dog drags her into a bar where who should she find but her husband, William Powell, who's constantly drunk out of his mind.
I'm not taking him, he's taking him.
You heard by him.
Women and children first, boys.
Say, what is the score anyway?
Oh, so it's you he was after.
Hello, sugar.
He's dragged me into every gym bill on the block.
Yeah, I had him out this morning.
Oh, I thought so.
Oh, uh, uh, this is Tommy, uh, my wife.
How are you?
How do you do?
Tommy, I don't usually look like this.
I've been Christmas shopping.
Madam, I'm afraid we shall take the dog out.
Oh, it's all right, Joe.
It's all right.
It's my dog.
And my wife.
Well, you might have mentioned me first on the billing.
The dog's well trained.
He'll behave himself.
It might bite somebody.
Oh, he's all right.
Look, lie down.
Lie down.
Stand up.
When he says, stand up, the dog sits down.
We say, lie down.
And I love the line, this is my dog, this is my wife.
The dog is well trained.
Anyway, for those of you who remember Get Smart with Don Adams, does anybody remember that?
You know, hello, Chief.
Would you believe?
That was an imitation of William Powell, who had that voice.
How are you doing like this?
William Powell, allegedly Don Adams, who played Get Smart, told the story that he bumped into William Powell, and Powell said to him, I know you.
You're me.
All right.
One more day before the Clavenless weekend begins.
That was a fun mailbag, and we'll do it again next week.