Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 244 skewers Obama’s lame-duck antics—from "short-sheeting" the White House to canceling Putin’s HBO—while framing his final moves (expelling Russian diplomats, undermining Israel) as legacy-damaging sabotage of Trump. The episode contrasts Trump’s deregulation promises with Democratic obstruction, warning conservatives may face backlash for enabling him, yet praises his potential to dismantle Obama’s policies like the Iran deal. Clavin laments America’s elite-public divide, using Manchester by the Sea and Huckleberry Finn—where Huck defies slavery’s legality—to argue that true leadership demands moral rebellion over institutional compliance, urging a return to such principled defiance in politics. [Automatically generated summary]
As we look at 2016 in the rearview mirror, only to discover a white-eyed serial killer sitting in the back seat, causing us to remember too late that when you're in a horror movie, you never get into your car without checking the back seat first.
It's time to take a quick look at the final events of the year.
Soon-to-be former President, what's his name, is preparing for a transition to a new Trump administration, which in turn is preparing to wipe out any trace he ever existed.
President Obama or O'Hara or whatever his name is, has been busy smoothing the way for Trump by loosening all the tops of the White House salt shakers so that the new president will accidentally dump tons of salt on his food, short sheeting the White House beds so that Trump will tear the linen, and starting a new Cold War with Russia.
President Lama also used a penknife to scratch the word legacy into the wall of the Oval Office, claiming that now his legacy can't be erased.
When told that's not actually how a legacy works, President so-and-so stuck his fingers in his ears and shouted, if I can't hear you, you don't exist.
He then jumped into the Washington Mall reflecting pool because he'd read in the New York Times that he could walk on water.
No one knows where the president has gone since then, or particularly cares.
In other end-of-the-year news, actress Carrie Fisher died, and feminists paid tribute to the woman who finally convinced 13-year-old boys that watching a girl in a bikini chained to the living image of their darkest desires really is as arousing as they thought it would be when they fantasized about it in the privacy of their own bathrooms.
Fisher suffered from various mental disorders, which she blamed on the fact that her mother, actress Debbie Reynolds, was always upstaging her, but we can't talk about that now because Reynolds also died and was a much bigger star, so we have to talk about that instead.
Democrats say they're going to retaliate against Russia for hacking into John Podesta's emails.
Democrats say it was one thing when the Russians murdered tens of millions of their own people in service to communism.
It was another thing when they enslaved half of Europe for 70 years.
And yet another thing when they invaded Crimea and slaughtered thousands in the Middle East.
But when they embarrassed John Podesta, well, that's just going too far.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin responded to White House sanctions by issuing a statement saying, quote, I laugh, bear-like laugh, saying, ha ha ha, when girly American president tries to act like man against mighty Vlad, unquote.
President Gurley responded to the taunt by angrily canceling Putin's HBO subscription.
And finally, ultimate fighting legend Rhonda Rousey's comeback attempt went awry when Amanda Nunez beat her to a pulp in 48 seconds.
The media awarded Rousey the championship, however, pointing out that while she was utterly humiliated in the ring, she won the popular vote.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is to give you blue.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
Election Politics and Gold00:15:47
It's a wonderful day.
Hurrah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
How did all these people get in my bedroom?
Oh, I'm back.
The vacation is over.
What a lot of time.
And 2017 has begun.
That vacation, I did nothing.
I mean, the highlights of my vacation, I smoked a cigar with my son while the sun went down.
And we played Gears of War.
I got an Xbox for Christmas.
We played Gears of War.
And I basically spent most of my time talking to my two-year-old grandson.
I downloaded an alphabet game into my iPad.
I now know, you know, because two-year-olds want to repeat everything again and again and again.
I now know more about the letter H than Elmo does, you know?
I have the letter H down fat.
Anyway, what a year.
This is going to be so much fun.
We're done with Obama.
I got to say, I am so glad to see that guy, the back of that guy's suit.
Man, there's like eight years of like, well, you know, this is not who we are.
You know, this country is just the same as every other country, and I don't know why we're bullying everybody.
You know, eight years of that drag.
Man, to have somebody come in who at least enjoys the country, and we're going to have some crazy Trump stuff going on is going to be entertaining.
And then at the end, if you believe in Jesus, you go to heaven.
What's not the like?
But listen, things, it is going to be a roller coaster.
I'm warning you now.
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All right, this is going to be a blast.
I got to say, I am really today, as we're speaking, Congress is in session.
The first time in eight years you can hear those words without like your throat closing.
It's like Congress.
And Trump was at his New Year's Eve party.
This is a little hard, but this is hard to hear.
But Trump at his New Year's Eve party talked about what he wants to do just starting out of the gate.
Regulations are coming off.
We're going to get rid of Obamacare because we're going to have strong borders so that when people come into the country, they're going to come into the country legally, which is the way they want to happen.
We will build the wall.
You know that.
We're going to get things running properly.
I love the, if you can't see if you're not watching, the guy holding the eagle in back of the stuff.
I assume it's a stuffed eagle.
It's not like just pinioned back like that.
He's the official eagle holder.
I don't know if he'll pass the Senate confirmation hearings, but he's the Trump evil.
If you couldn't hear that, what he said is taxes are coming down, regulations are coming off, Obamacare is gone, and the wall is going up.
You know that.
And listen, that is all stuff that Paul Ryan can sign on to.
And that's a big deal.
I mean, Paul Ryan is in a very delicate position.
Remember, he did not support Trump during the election.
They never appeared together during the election.
He didn't stand up for Trump during that.
Remember the Bush tape with all the, you know, I go around grabbing women and all that stuff.
Kind of Ryan was sort of just edging toward the door at that place.
And Trump has a long memory.
But they're both, you know, these are both political men.
They know what they're doing.
These are all things that Ryan can sign on to.
They're going to get to Obamacare.
They're talking about it right away.
They're going into session even as we speak.
So I assume that Ryan is being reelected.
The Democrats, meanwhile, their strategy is to get in the way of everything.
They've already, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democrat leader, he comes out and he's got eight people appointments that he's going to slow walk.
He says he's going to hold them up, including Rex Tillerson at state, the department, Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, Betsy DeVos, all the important ones.
He says he's going to hold up.
I think that's great.
I think that's going to be a great strategy if they want to have nobody in Congress after the next election.
So that's going to be really funny.
The thing is, they're selling this.
I saw this in the New York Times today, former newspaper, and they're selling this all over the mainstream media, is that, well, this is what the Republicans did.
The Republicans were obstructionist, and they keep quoting Mitch McConnell, who said, my major objective is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.
But they make one big mistake.
And here is Allison Camerada being caught, CNN.
Sean Spicer, Trump's spokesman, catches her making this mistake right here.
They put a list of 10 people out saying we're going to oppose these 10 people, not on the basis of their qualification to hold office, not on their qualification to an act changer that they were the best person, but because they thought they could score political points.
And the Republicans, again, before President Obama ever got into office, you know famously said we are going to oppose every possible thing that we can.
I mean, isn't this sort of how the game is played in Washington actually?
Absolutely.
Again, just to correct the record, Mitch McConnell, a year after President Obama was in in a political setting, our goal is to make him a one-term president.
What Republican doesn't want to make sure that we have one-term people of the opposition party?
That's our job, is to make sure we elect more Republicans.
So that comment was said a year after he got into office.
The idea that they are now trying to obstruct this cabinet prior to him even taking office is quite contrary to anything that's even come close to this.
And even Spicer gets it wrong.
It was two years.
It was two years after Obama took office right before the midterm election when he was politics time.
That's when Mitch McConnell said it.
That was two years of Obama saying, we won.
We're shoving Obamacare down your throat.
We don't have to pay any attention to you.
Remember, John McCain would make a suggestion and you would say, you lost the election, John.
Mr. Grace, New York Times is always saying, we're going to miss his graceful, kindly, polite, you know, he was a schmuck.
He was an absolute, he's been such a downer.
It's been, you know, I don't think the people on the East Coast and the West Coast understand what it just feels like.
You know what, if you were a football player and your coach came out and said, well, you know, we like our team, but they like their team.
And, you know, we don't want to be, we don't want to bully them.
We don't want to be, you know, it's not fair for one team to go to the Super Bowl.
I mean, that's what the guy has been like.
You know, it's like, hell yes, it is.
This is our team.
This is our country.
It's a better country than anybody else.
Every country on earth that is free owes it to us.
Every single free man walking the planet owes it in some degree to the United States of America.
We're allowed to cheer for this country.
We're allowed to believe in it.
We're allowed to keep it strong.
You know, it's just been such a drag.
So now Obama is using his last days in office to try and mire Trump in old business to protect his legacy.
And you know, it's funny.
You think of Obama as a great politician.
He did such a bad job during his first term.
The economy was lousy.
The war was blowing up.
He lost the war we had already won in Iraq and all this stuff.
And yet he won the election.
So you sort of think of him as this great politician.
Plus, he did drive conservatives nuts.
You know, I mean, like, people, he just said things that would make conservatives go crazy.
He would shove all this stuff through executive orders.
And nobody would stop him because he was the first black president trademark.
So nobody was, everybody was afraid to stand up.
They would announce beforehand that they would never impeach him.
They would do all this stuff.
The press didn't cover any of his scandals and all this stuff.
But I'm beginning to wonder if he was just given such a clear path to do anything that he wanted, that he looked a lot smarter than he was.
Because some of the stuff he's doing now, he is now maneuvering politically.
So there's all this stuff with Russia, right?
Russia, 18 months ago, they found out that Russia had tricked John Podesta into with a phishing scam into letting them put some malware in his computer.
They got some emails that embarrassed him.
Now they're saying, oh yeah, now they're calling it he, they hacked the election.
They didn't hack the election.
They hacked John Podesta.
You know, they did this to me once.
You know, I got a virus on my computer, probably looking at some disgusting thing I shouldn't have been looking at in the first place.
And I got a virus on my computer.
What did I do?
I went on the internet, thought free antivirus software, downloaded that, and my computer basically blew up.
And I called our tech guy.
He came over to the house and he said, yeah, the Russians do this.
What they do is they put these things that say free antivirus software up there and it blows up your computer and then you pay to get them to come in to get software that they sell you that will take it out.
It's like the Russian mob.
It's a scam.
And I had a guy that I called, so he just lifted it out.
So they hack everybody.
This is what they're doing.
I'm not saying it's a good thing.
I'm not saying we don't have to pay attention to it.
But what Obama's doing is he's now suddenly, suddenly it becomes a big deal.
And he announced that he's going to expel over 30 diplomat spies from Russia.
This is his announcement.
It's a lame duck.
So Putin, Putin doesn't even bother to retaliate against him.
It's like, I don't care what girly lame duck says.
Ha ha ha.
He's dealing with Boris Badenoff over there.
And at the same time, Kellyanne Conway makes the point.
She makes it politely, but she basically makes the point that this is politics.
And I think those who are trying to bait him into a bigger response, I would say two things to them.
Number one, you can't have it both ways.
You can, on the one hand, say, hey, just one president at a time, and we have one now for the next 22 days or so named President Barack Obama.
But at the same time, you want the president-elect to make new policy.
I was really disappointed to read in David Sanger's New York Times piece this evening the allegation or the supposition that perhaps one reason that these sanctions are taking place is to, quote, box in President-elect Trump, forcing him to take a position or otherwise once he takes office.
I hope that this isn't motivated by politics even a little bit.
Yeah, even a little bit.
This babe is the smartest person in the administration so far.
I just see she is so on point.
She really is following stuff.
Here's the thing.
Here's what they're doing.
Okay.
Here's what the Democrats led by Obama are doing.
Trump has a problem with Russia.
He's got lots of holdings over there, lots of business with them.
Donald Trump Jr. said Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of our assets.
Got lots of friends.
He had, remember, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Carter Page, who were all parts of his campaign, and they were all deeply involved with Russia.
This is what the Democrats are going to do if Trump doesn't get tangled up in dealing with Vladimir Putin, then they're going to say, oh, he's not doing it.
He's going easy on Russia because he has all these holdings.
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So, of course, the Democrats pull off the strategy, and there are always these useful idiots like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who go charging off.
We must hold hearings on Thursday to fight the Russians and all this.
My feeling is this: Vladimir Putin's going to be there for eight years.
He's going to be around.
There's plenty of time to fight him, plenty of time to wrangle with the Russians and all this stuff.
Cut your taxes, cut the regulations, get rid of this monstrous Obamacare that is sitting on top of the economy, get rid of the Frank Dodd-Frank laws, all this stuff.
There's so much stuff to do.
The House Republicans kind of tried to neuter the ethics, the Independent Ethics Committee the other day.
It's not really as big a deal as all that.
It just looks bad, and the press will use it to make it look bad.
And Trump kind of responded: hey, we've got more important stuff to take care of.
Keep your eyes on what is going on, you know, and worry about Russia another time.
Believe me, the Russians aren't going away.
It's not like one day you're going to open the map and there's not going to be Russia there.
There's going to be Russia.
There's going to be Putin.
It's going to be trouble.
There's all plenty of time to deal with that stuff.
The other thing that Obama did to try and tangle up Trump, which I just think was like an idiot mistake, is he didn't veto the UN resolution sanctioning Israel for having settlements, including in East Jerusalem.
Here's Obama on that.
Okay, I hope you're not going to get tired of that joke because you're going to hear a lot for the next 17, 18 days.
Let's listen to John Kerry talking crap about Israel.
They are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality that most people do not actually want.
Today, there are a number, there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
They have a choice.
They can choose to live together in one state or they can separate into two states.
But here is a fundamental reality: if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic.
It cannot be both.
And it won't ever really be at peace.
What a jerk.
What a jerk thing to say.
Israel's Dilemma00:07:23
I mean, it's utter crap, by the way.
You know, like a country can guide itself any way it wants.
Democracy that gets rid of democracy is no democracy.
And we know that the Palestinians, given democracy, elect a terrorist coalition government.
You know, it's not like that just having democracy is somehow this magic trick that makes things go well.
Israel has every right to be a Jewish state.
That's its brief.
That's what it is.
You know, you don't like it, don't play.
You know, don't play the game.
This carry has utterly, utterly failed.
So now they let the UN sanction, this is amazing, sanction Israel for building settlements, including in Jerusalem, you know, at the Whaling Wall, which is the second temple, like the temple in Jesus' time.
They're sanctioning, you know, trying to shore up your legacy by hurting the Jews.
It didn't work for the Babylonians.
It didn't work for the Assyrians.
It didn't work for the Romans.
It didn't work for the Nazis.
It ain't going to work for the Obama administration.
It's just dumb.
And it means that now, suddenly, Trump is a hero, going to be a hero to the Jewish people.
Here's Netanyahu answering back.
This is the leader of the free world, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Over decades, American administrations and Israeli governments have disagreed about settlements.
But we agreed that the Security Council was not the place to resolve this issue.
We knew that going there would make negotiations harder and drive peace further away.
And as I told John Kerry on Thursday, friends don't take friends to the security council.
I'm encouraged by the statements of our friends in the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike.
They understand how reckless and destructive this UN resolution was.
They understand that the Western Wall isn't occupied territory.
I look forward to working with those friends and with the new administration when it takes office next month.
You know, like our friends, our friends, Barack, you know, the other people in America.
And look, you know, it's not that America needs to constantly be tangled up in Israeli politics, but it is the tip of the spear of freedom in that area, an area that is going up in smoke.
Obama has been working to realign our interests with Iran.
It's just not going to happen.
Iran is a terrorist state.
And I don't even know what Obama is thinking about, except his just his gut disdain for the West, his gut disdain for the country and the culture that gave him everything he has, that handed it to him without his doing anything to earn it.
And he just despises it.
He has made his choice in this kind of identity politics world where he is the oppressed forever.
He's forever oppressed, and he hates, he hates this culture.
And Israel is the kind of like thorn in his side, and it was just an ugly, stupid thing to do.
And Trump just blew it off.
Here's Trump blowing it off at a quick presser outside of his place.
Do you have any further comments about Perry's speech?
You know, you have to know ourselves.
Perhaps his speech really speaks for itself.
Yeah, it speaks for itself.
It was pretty ugly.
But he said that friends need to set friends straight.
And that was one of the things.
If we have different views, we have to have peace.
I take it, set it back.
But we're going to see what happens after January 20th, right?
I think you're going to be very impressed.
I know.
It's like quack, It really is.
So it's just hard to tell.
Is Obama like a master strategist or is he a child throwing a temper tantrum?
And would those two things look any different?
I mean, you know, you keep saying it's brilliant politicking, but Bill McGurn pointed this out in the Wall Street Journal today.
Trump can undo virtually everything Obama has done except Obamacare because Obamacare is the only legislative accomplishment, the only real legislative accomplishment of these eight years.
He can undo the Iran deal.
He can undo the Paris Agreement.
He can undo all those executive orders on amnesty and bathrooms and all the stuff.
First day, with with a pen.
He can blow Obama's legacy right out like a dandelion.
You know, just like blow it to the wind.
He can become a hero to the Jews in a minute.
And listen, it's always a good thing to be a hero to the Jews.
God likes it.
The Jews like it.
It's always a positive thing.
Hero to coal miners, they just passed another law that basically limits the coal, the exploration for coal.
He can get rid of that.
Just do all this stuff in a minute.
And my attitude is going to be this.
Here's my attitude.
You know, a lot of conservatives like me, who are small government conservatives, who worry, we worry that Trump, and Newt Gingrich said it, you know, Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, he said his greatest fear is that Trump will cave in, sell out to the Democrats, sell out to win the love of the New York Times, all this stuff.
And that's my fear too.
I mean, I'm afraid of that as well.
But there is, I am, I enter this year extremely hopeful.
I mean, the regulation thing, you know, when this country started, there were four cabinet posts.
It was like Treasury, War, Attorney General, and Secretary of State.
That was it.
That was it.
We don't need an education department.
Why do we need an education department?
The EPA should be one guy, you know, calling up the state saying, is your air clean?
You know, yes, our airs, thank you very much.
That's all the EPA needs to do.
You know, all this stuff that Obama has been using to put a stranglehold on business so that we haven't had one quarter of three, not one quarter of 3% growth during the Obama administration.
All that stuff could be blown away.
And is there going to be crazy stuff?
Look, Trump is an undependable guy.
He's a little bit of a, you know, I can't tell yet whether there's method to his madness or just madness to his method.
You know, it's one or the other, you know.
But let me leave you, let me leave off this conversation with this quote.
I've read it before, but I love this quote from Lord Acton, who was the great historian of freedom, 1877.
I think he made this speech, where he said, at all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own.
This association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous by giving to opponents just ground of opposition and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
What that means to unpack that is those of us who care about the processes and the checks and balances that preserve our freedoms are very rare.
If you had a stupid Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the evangelicals would be delighted.
But a lot of conservatives would go, no, that's not the way to do that.
That was a stupid Supreme Court decision.
We want a good constitutional Supreme Court decision.
That's why conservatives opposed Harriet Myers when Bush tried to appoint her saying, well, she'll take care of abortion.
We're like, no, no, no, we want a constitutional justice in there.
You know, we are fighting to preserve our constitutional freedoms.
So we're going to go along with Trump.
I think there are going to be some tremendous victories.
Why We Left Freedom00:09:50
I really do.
Huge, huge victories.
Bigly, we're going to win bigly.
But there's also going to be craziness.
We're going to be blamed for it.
That's what Lord Acton is saying.
When you have to associate yourself to get a majority, you're going to be blamed for things that those other people do.
We are going to be blamed.
Conservatives are going to be blamed for things that Trump does, even the things that he does that we don't like.
We're going to be blamed for him.
Tough luck.
That's the way it is.
That's the game.
There's no sense complaining.
There's just no sense complaining about that.
That is part of being a freedom-loving, constitution-loving conservative.
We are going to take the hit, but we are going to have a tremendous ride.
This is going to be genuine fun.
I really do think so.
If we don't have a war, if we don't have like a, you know, some kind of horrible collapse of government, it is going to be a ride, and we are here to be entertained.
Speaking of entertainment, I watched a couple of movies.
Mostly I played with the letter H over vacation, but I did watch a couple of movies.
I watched this picture, Manchester by the Sea, and I want to talk about this for a minute because it really does speak to something about the arts, and it speaks to something about our government, the state of our country right at this minute.
Casey Affleck, Ben Affleck's brother, one of my favorite actors, just a tremendous, tremendous actor.
But I don't think he's ever going to be a big star because he's basically a character actor.
He doesn't have the presence to be a big star.
He can disappear into a role.
So he makes this picture, Manchester by the Sea, which is about a guy trying to recover after a terrible tragedy.
He basically, I think I can say this without giving too much away.
There's a slight spoiler, but it's pretty early on in the movie.
He basically leaves a fireplace unguarded, burns down, his children die.
So his life falls apart.
And this happens in the future when he's trying to come back from this terrible tragedy.
So I'm sitting in a waiting room in some studio, you know, waiting for a meeting, and the Hollywood reporter is there, and I'm reading the Hollywood Reporter.
And they're saying this is going to be Casey Affleck's breakout role.
This is going to make him a star.
And I watched this movie, and the guy, he's brilliant in it, he's absolutely brilliant.
But it's about this terrible tragedy.
It's two hours of like drab, grim, you know, glacial evolution, you know, character evolution.
And I thought, who on earth thought that this would be a breakout role for anybody?
Let's take a look at this scene.
This is just a snippet of the best scene in the picture when his now ex-wife, who blamed him for the tragedy, and he get together and they're two inarticulate people trying to reconnect, trying to put things back together, and they can't get the words out.
It's a beautiful scene.
Let's take a quick look.
I don't have anything big to say.
Okay.
I know you've been around and I thought.
Just begin Patrick settled in.
It seems like he's doing pretty good, huh?
Considering.
I think he is, yeah.
I guess you don't know this, but I really kept in touch with Joe.
It's been kind of where we not see and Patrick.
Oh.
Okay.
I didn't know.
You could see if you want.
Did we ever have lunch?
You mean us? You and me?
And the scene goes on for like two, three minutes where they just can't get the...
You know, there's all this horror and death between.
They can't get the words out.
All right.
So this is an intellectual, small movie that a couple of people are going to like.
You know, I kind of liked it.
I kind of resented that it was so tiny, so slow, so grim, you know, and depressing and all this stuff.
But it's beautifully done, and he's a great actor.
But the fact that anybody in Hollywood thought this would be a breakout role for anybody or breakout anything for anyone just shows you how bubble-dumb, to use John Nolte's great phrase, how bubbledum they are, how closed off they are.
But it also shows you, going back to something I said after I saw Star Wars, how when an art form ages, the entertainment section and the intellectual section break in two.
At its best, at the height of an art form, you get Shakespeare plays where great plot, sword fights, love affairs, But also brilliant insights into the human condition.
When the movies were at their best, you got Casablanca, one of the most entertaining, Gone with the Wind, incredible entertainments that also spoke to something romantic and beautiful in the human spirit and had beautiful imagery, Hitchcock films, all these things.
The movies have now reached a moribund state where they're making kind of empty calorie films like the last Star War films and films that are filled with calories, but aren't that entertaining?
You know, and those two things break off.
And it occurred to me after watching Star Wars and then watching this that the same thing happens to nations.
The same thing happens to nations when the elite, the intellectuals, the minds of the nation separate from the people.
The people who do the work, the people who run the country, who build things, who invent things, who take the garbage away, who sweep the streets, those people.
When those people and the elites separate, a country is in a moribund state.
And that is the state we have been in for the last, I would say, more than eight years, but Obama has been the worst symptom of that.
And the question is: is that a fatal condition?
And we're about to find out.
We're about to find out if the intellectuals in this country can put themselves at the service, which is the way that intellectuals are supposed to work.
They're supposed to be at the service of the people.
They're not supposed to be above the people telling them what to do.
They're supposed to be at one with the people's desires and the things that are good for the people, even sometimes when the people may not know it, like freedom.
Sometimes the people don't want freedom.
It's up to intellectuals to fight for it, yes.
But I think that we've become so separate, this rule by experts that has completely detached Washington, D.C. from the rest of the country, and you only have to look at the electoral map to see.
You can drive, you could drive 3,000 miles in this country without smelling a Democrat.
And then you get to where the stink is heavy, LA and New York.
They're all pooled.
These two things have got to come together because when body and soul separate, that's the end.
That's the end.
It's the end of a person's life, and it's the end of an art form's life, and it's the end of a country's life.
And that is something that really was on the verge of happening.
Let's see if we've avoided it.
It's going to be fun to watch.
That's all I can say.
Stuff I like.
Let's do a quick foundational stuff I like, stuff I really, really like.
You know, Huckleberry Finn, they always say there are no good sequels.
Huckleberry Finn, one of the greatest American novels of all time, is the sequel to Tom Sawyer.
And Ernest Hemingway said, all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
And there is a reason for that.
They call Twain the Lincoln of our literature because he freed our literature from the fancy forms of European writing, the fancy, like exact observation of high-class people having dinner, where the fork goes and where the spoon goes and how Lord so-and-so, what Lord So-and-so says to the Duke of such and such, and all this stuff.
Suddenly, he blew all that away by writing about this kid, Huckleberry Finn, this barefoot wastrel, who escapes with an escaped slave, Jim, and goes the wrong way.
They're trying to go up the river, but they go down the Mississippi River.
There is one scene in this book, which is the essential scene.
It is the essential scene of American literature.
I don't remember if I've read this before on the air.
It's possible I have once or twice, but Huck and Jim, this escaped slave, have been escaping, and Huck realizes that he is violating all the rules of the law and of God because he believes that what he's been told, that God means these people to be slaves.
And so he realizes that he's in a state of sin.
This little kid, this ignorant, you know, unschooled little kid, realizes he's in a state of sin.
And so he writes a letter to tell Jim's master, Jim's owner, where Jim is.
He's going to betray his friend, they've now become friends.
He's going to betray his friend.
And after he writes this letter, he feels much better, and he's about to send it.
And he says, let me read it.
Is written in Huckleberry's Finn's accent.
He says, I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now because he's written this letter, Turning in His Friend.
He says, But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and sat there thinking, thinking how good it was all this happened so and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.
Going to hell because he's helping this slave escape.
He says, I went on thinking, and I got to thinking over our trip down the river, and I see Jim before me all the time, in the day and in the nighttime.
Sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we afloating along, talking and singing and laughing.
But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.
I'd see him standing my watch on top of his instead of calling me so I could go on sleeping and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog and when I come home to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was and such like times and would always call me honey and pet me and do everything he could think of for me and how good he always was.
And at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard and he was so grateful and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only one he's got now.
And then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place.
I took it up and held it in my hand.
I was a trembling because I'd got to decide forever betwixt two things and I noted.
I studied a minute sort of holding my breath and then says to myself, all right then, I'll go to hell.
And I tore the letter up.
It's a brilliant scene because it's a kid, an uneducated kid, telling the church, telling the religious authorities, telling the legal authorities that his conscience rules and he will suffer.
He believes he's going to hell.
He believes he's going to hell for helping his friend and yet he'll do it.
I'll Go to Hell00:00:30
And that, that is the voice of America.
That is the voice of America.
It's been done a hundred ways before.
We'll do it a different way this time.
All the experts say we should do it this way.
All right then, we'll go to hell, but we're going to do what we think is right.
And that voice, let's hope that voice starts to speak again in this year.
And if it does, man, we'll be singing the accompaniment.
I love that voice more than anything.
All right, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show, a short week.
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