Ep. 280’s host mocks feminist "Day Without a Woman" satire while attacking Obamacare’s pre-existing condition protections as government overreach, framing conservatives as futile resisters to expanding state control. Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger exposes how agencies like the EPA bypass due process via administrative hearings, citing Chevron deference and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, while his Civil Liberties Alliance fights back. The episode then pivots to Not Without My Daughter—Sally Field’s 1991 film about an American woman escaping Iran—dismissed by critics like NYT’s Vincent Canby as "comic" but celebrated by audiences, revealing leftist bias against conservative narratives on Islamism. The show ends with a plea to defy media suppression of such stories. [Automatically generated summary]
Feminists have decreed that March 8th will be a day without a woman.
So ladies, if you're planning to join this important event, please remember to stock the refrigerator with sandwiches before you go so we'll have something to eat.
Otherwise, I know all us men will be dreading the moment women go on strike all day and wondering how on earth we're going to store up enough whiskey and cigars to get through an entire Jason Statham Film Festival.
But you know, if women are going off on their own for the day, it only seems fair Pardon me, it only seems fair that they should leave behind not just men, but also all the things that men have given them over the years.
After all, if you want us to learn how difficult it would be for men to get along without women, then you should also have to learn how difficult it would be for women to get along without men.
So, on Day Without a Woman Day, how about women don't get to use anything that was invented or discovered by a man?
That would include democracy, cars, computers, aspirin, electricity, telephones, light bulbs, tools, television, the piano, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, the internet, paved roads, lawnmowers, books, clocks, thermometers, the cysteine chapel, Shakespeare's plays,
soda trains, vaccines, paper, steel, airplanes, the Constitution, elevators, recorded music, pasteurized milk, the ballpoint pen, radio zippers, nylon cameras, movies, synthetic material, email, and pretty much everything else except for alphabet blocks, windshield wipers, and radioactivity, though you might not want to use all three of those at the same time.
Also, while you're out there protesting how poorly men have treated you, you might want to make some exceptions.
Say for those men who have defended your countries, patrolled your streets, built your houses, cities, and highways, pulled you out of burning buildings, treated your diseases, supported your children, and faithfully loved you.
Because really, when you think about it, if men don't love women, who do you think will?
Then there's the question of priorities.
Feminists in the West are dealing with such titanic issues as the fact that information bots like Siri and Alexa have female voices.
This is a problem because these bots are helpful and knowledgeable, which makes them unfeminist since feminists have never helped anyone and don't know anything.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be worried about crap like this.
Feminists are also complaining that Siri and Alexa don't protest when you sexually harass them.
Although any guy who gets his kicks by sexually harassing a little plastic box is so pitiful, you might want to cut him some slack.
On the other hand, feminists never seem to protest that women in Muslim countries are routinely flogged, stoned, and imprisoned for expressing their humanity.
So you can understand why this might cause some observers to believe that this day without a woman might actually turn out to be a day without a spoiled, whiny, entitled feminist girl child in an absurd pussy hat making a fool of herself over nothing.
In fact, I actually said as much to Alexa, but she slapped me.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-ducky.
Shipsha-tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
It makes me wise to sing!
Obamacare's Compromises00:12:46
All right, Day Without a Woman Day, and maybe tonight if my wife hears that opening.
But, you know, we have a lot to talk about today.
We have a guest in the second half of the show, Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia University, a law professor who has written a, I think, a devastating article in this quarter's city journal, the indispensable city journal, about how our rights are being eroded by the deep state, by the administrative state, as it's sometimes called.
Really interesting piece, and we'll talk to him about it.
Also, we got to talk about the healthcare repeal and replace Obamacare with Obamacare.
I think that's a new healthcare.
But you know, actually, let's step back on this healthcare thing, okay?
This is the proposal that the GOP has made for how they're going to repeal Obamacare and what they're going to replace it with.
And conservatives are a little concerned that it's, as Rand Paul is calling it, it's Obamacare light.
And I want to take a step back, because this is only the beginning.
There's going to be all these arguments and amendments and changes and all this stuff.
And so maybe it's a good thing, I think, that it gets out in the open and the arguments and the debates begin.
But the idea is that it's going to repeal, let's see, it's going to repeal the mandate, the requirement that Americans have health coverage or pay a penalty.
So you won't be paying a penalty, and it will even forgive, I think, backwards the penalty that you would have paid for not having health care in 2016.
And it's also got, keeps, it gets rid of the mandate that larger employers provide health insurance to workers, and it also repeals most of the taxes that Obamacare imposes and freezes funding after 2020 for the states that expanded Medicaid under the law.
So it does do a lot of, it does do a lot of good things.
I mean, these are, you know, these taxes are ridiculous.
The Medicaid expansion is incredibly expensive.
But it also retains the requirements that insurance cover people with pre-existing conditions, which, as I keep pointing out, is government health care.
If insurers have to insure you when you're already sick, that's not insurance.
That's not how insurance works.
Insurance is a gamble that you make with the health company.
You are gambling that you will get sick, and they are gambling that you will stay well long enough for them to collect enough money from you to pay for your being sick.
The idea is that you win either way, because if you're well, you don't care, and if you're sick, you get the money.
So it also has this kind of weird first of all, it gives tax credits to people, to lower-income people and older people for health care.
So that's kind of a entitlement right there.
And it also creates this kind of backdoor mandate where if you let your insurance lapse and you go back, it charges you 30%.
But I want to talk about, I want to look at this from a bigger picture, because later on we're going to have the Columbia professor come on and talk about the deep state and the way it's eroding our rights.
And I want to talk about the state and the growth of the state, because this is what this healthcare thing is all about.
Now, one of the reasons that people are always making the joke that they listen to Shapiro Show and they get depressed and they listen to me and I cheer them up.
The reason I don't get depressed, oddly enough, about politics is because I have a tragic view of life.
That sounds paradoxical, but it's not.
I believe that freedom is a living thing and freedom dies.
At its best, freedom in the past, I think, has had maybe a 400-year lifespan.
Usually it's closer to 100 or 200 years.
We're doing pretty well here, I think.
And if you believe that things die every day is a good day, right?
I mean, it's just like getting old.
You know, I don't like getting old, but I fight it every step of the way.
But I understand that getting old is better than the alternative, which is dying.
So that's the way I feel about the government.
Every day that we have freedom is a good day.
And I think of conservatives like doctors.
You fighting a losing battle to keep something alive that will ultimately die, but every day you win, you win.
And that's why I find myself rather cheerful when things are going.
Now, so how do I feel?
I mean, what kills freedom ultimately is this desire to make things fair, okay?
And that we understand the desire to make things fair, but it ultimately bleeds into equality, and equality kills freedom.
Why does equality kill freedom?
Let's say you've got two guys who want to play basketball.
One of them is LeBron James and one of them is me.
If I want to be equal to LeBron James, there's only one way to do it.
I have to hobble LeBron James, right?
I have to make LeBron James worse because I can't be as good as LeBron James because reality, nature does not create equality in people.
So you say, well, okay, you can't be as good as LeBron James, but at least you can have as much money as LeBron James has.
Why is it fair that he puts a ball through a hoop and gets to be a gazillionaire and you are witty and brilliant and attractive, sexually desirable, and you're not, you know, you're just scraping by, right?
So that is the problem.
So I and I agree with that argument.
So the only way I can do that is I can take LeBron's money and give it to me.
And why does that get rid of his freedom?
Because he creates his money through his time and his hard work and his training and his talent.
And all those things belong to him.
If they belong to the government, why does the government get to say that these belong to us?
We own your talent, we own your time, we own your training.
Therefore, if we think Clavin deserves the money, we can give it to him.
Why does the government have that right?
It doesn't.
So equality is the enemy of freedom always.
You know, we can make things a little bit fair.
We can say that Clavin doesn't have to die gasping in the street because he can't afford food.
Maybe LeBron can put in a little bit of money for that.
Maybe.
But still, it's LeBron's money.
He worked for it.
He paid it.
It's his.
His freedom depends on his being able to keep the sweat of his brow.
And that is why conservatives are always fighting the state.
You know, they're fighting the state because they know, you know, here's the thing.
If health care were free, I would support it.
If healthcare could be free, I would support it.
If healthcare could be free, Ben Shapiro would support it.
You know, Sean Hannity would support it.
All the conservatives would support.
We're not mean, but it's not free.
Nothing is free.
Somebody has to pay for it.
And when somebody pays for it, his freedom is taken away.
The state never gives you anything.
It never gives you anything.
It only takes things away.
It trades you freedom.
It trades you stuff for your freedom, for its power, your freedom.
And that's built into the state.
That doesn't mean a leftist is necessarily an evildoer.
He's probably just trying to help.
He may just be trying to help.
It's built into the system that equality takes away your freedom.
Everything the government gives you takes away your freedom.
So the problem that conservatives have with Obamacare is that it takes people's freedom away, right?
If you give people health care, what do you get?
Well, not only are you taking somebody's money to pay for somebody else's health care, which is limiting their freedom, but you're putting somebody into a system where the state now gets to make choices.
What if you smoke?
Well, should the state be asked to pay for it if you get lung cancer because you smoke?
Didn't you do something wrong?
Didn't you cause your own lung cancer?
Shouldn't it be able to prevent you from smoking?
Shouldn't the state be able to say you can't smoke because we have to pay for the lung cancer you get?
Now, liberals love that argument because they want to stop everybody from smoking, but they don't love it so much when you start to say, well, you know, illegitimate children cost the state money too because a lot of them end up in jail.
Single-parent homes cost the state money.
So should the state be able to say when you can have sex, with whom you can have sex, whether you have to be protected when you have sex?
I mean, the state can make all kinds of decisions once it's got a hold of health care.
Healthcare is the holy grail for leftists because it gives them all this power.
Now, Obamacare, and this is the problem the GOP has.
Obamacare is an entitlement.
But it's unpaid for.
The idea of Obamacare is everybody is forced to get health care, and so the healthy young people are paying for the sick old people, right?
But the healthy young people are saying, like, man, I don't want to do it.
I don't want to do it.
I don't even care if you put a level of penalty on me.
I'm not going to do it.
It was built to collapse.
It was built to be unfunded and collapsed because Hillary Clinton was going to be president.
The Democrats were going to own the Congress forever.
And when it collapsed, they would be there to make it a single-payer system, which basically means government health care.
And then they would have all that power, all that control over every decision you make because it would all affect your health, and we'd all have to pay for it so they'd get to say what you do.
That was the plan.
honk, you know, Donald Trump got elected, things didn't work out, and so now the GOP is stuck with this thing, and how do they get rid of it?
Here is the problem with getting rid of it.
What do we do about the poor?
Nobody wants to say this, it's right, because they're all talking about making sure everybody has insurance.
That is not the problem.
If you created a system in which all insurers were competing with all other insurers, and people could just get insurance that only covered them in case of a disaster, right?
So I'll pay for my checkups.
I'll pay for my, you know, whatever, my hearing aid or whatever I need, you know, I'll pay for some meds.
Prices drop.
Television sets come out and they cost a million dollars and then within a year they cost $500 because there's competition, right?
The prices go down once everybody is buying in.
That would help happen with health care too, except in cases of catastrophic care where you need catastrophic care.
So you get insurance for that.
Still, still, you have the poor.
So every time Republicans try to fix this system, the NBC, CBS, the Democrat news media, ABC, the New York Times, Washington Public's going to run out, find a poor person dying sick, coughing up his lungs, take pictures of it, put it on TV, and say, this is what this Republicans killed this man, and this woman, this child, all these things.
And we're all nice people.
We don't want to have that happen.
We don't want the poor to die because they can't afford health care.
And the big thing, the big thing that nobody talks about is people talk about the skyrocketing cost of health care.
That's not what is happening.
What is happening is until, let's see, what is it?
It's 2016.
Until about 100 years ago, healthcare, we didn't have any health care.
You couldn't do anything.
Maybe 150 years ago, doctors used to kill you.
They'd come over and bleed you.
They'd come over and do this stuff.
It was like magic.
It was like witch doctor magic.
Until the invention, the discovery of antibiotics by men, as we recall from our opening, until the discovery of antibiotics, they weren't really doing anything.
Now they can help you.
Now they can do amazing things.
They can keep you alive.
They can get your limbs.
They can do all this stuff.
And it all costs money.
So the question is, what is going to happen to the poor?
And personally, I think there's going to have to be an answer to this.
One of the things about understanding that freedom dies is understanding you have to make little compromises as you go along, just like you do when you get older.
You know, I don't want to concede anything to old age, but eventually I stopped doing martial arts because I knew I was going to get catastrophically injured.
You know, you give up little bits.
During the 30s, conservatives lost the argument over welfare.
We started to have a welfare state, as all free nations start to have a welfare state.
And yes, is it the beginning of the end?
Yes, it is.
Do you have to do it?
Yes, you do.
Why?
Because freedom creates wealth, and wealth makes people say, well, how come people are dying on the streets when our country is so rich and all this stuff?
So that is something that happens.
And then you have to fight the growth of welfare, but it slowly grows.
And the same thing is true of health care.
The only thing I would say before we cut away and bring on our guests, the only thing I would say is it is possible that the GOP should grasp the nettle, as they say, should understand that there's going to have to be an entitlement for the poor.
The poor can no longer go to their families and get the kind of health care that people can get.
There may have to be a separate bill to deal with this.
And maybe trying to deal with it all in this one bill is the big mistake they're making, because essentially what this bill does so far is it accepts the logic of Obamacare, that the government has to do something for everybody, has to have health care, provide health care for everybody.
It accepts that logic, which is the logic of equality, government growth, and ultimately the destruction of freedom.
So let's see what happens.
I mean, this is not the time to panic, not the time to run around.
It is the time to watch the fight.
The big thing, I'll conclude with this, is that Trump's reputation is riding on this.
Because up till now, everything has been executive orders and the Twitter sideshow, right?
This is governing.
This is when you get on the phone and call up the lawmakers and say what you want.
Trump so far has supported this bill, but we'll have to see what happens.
Due Process in Courts00:13:04
Have we got the professor on the line?
All right, we're going to have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but come on over to thedailywire.com.
We've got a really interesting interview coming up.
Plus, tomorrow is the mailbag day.
I forgot to say that.
Did I say that?
Tomorrow is mailbag.
Get your questions in.
If you subscribe, you can get your questions in.
We will answer them.
Answers are guaranteed 97.5% accurate.
They dropped a little bit from 100%.
but they are 100% guaranteed to change your life, possibly for the better.
All right, we do have the professor on the line.
Yes.
Yes, excellent.
Philip Hamburger is the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
He is the leading scholar of constitutional law and its history, who works on many topics, including religious liberty, freedom of speech, academic censorship, judicial review, the office and duty of judges, administrative power.
His books are Separation of Church and State, Law and Judicial Duty, and is administrative law unlawful, which is what we're going to be talking about today.
That book, which was published in 2014, won the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Prize.
And there is a version of his argument in this quarter's city journal, How Government Agencies Usurp Our Rights.
If you're not getting City Journal, you don't actually have to get it.
I have to be honest with you.
Just go online and read the pieces.
It is a Manhattan Institute product.
I am a contributing editor, I should mention.
But it really is a terrific magazine, and it will make your friends think you're smart.
I know you're not, but it'll make your friends think you're smart.
Can I see him?
Or there he is.
Professor Hoyls.
How are you doing?
I am good.
Excellent, excellent article.
Just really talking about how the administrate erodes our Fifth Amendment right to due process.
And this is obviously a big issue.
This is everybody's complaining about the deep state, and this essentially is the deep state.
I want to start as simply as possible so we know what we're talking about.
Explain what we all hear about due process.
Explain what due process is exactly.
Well, I wish the courts could make it a little clearer.
Traditionally, due process was simply the right to be called in to answer questions and respond to charges only in a court of law and only by their processes.
But since then, it's altered.
It's been reduced to the right to a hearing, or perhaps even a hearing in which you're not present.
That's the administrative faux process, in which you may not have counsel, in which perhaps you don't have equal rights of discovery, in which you may not even know what the charges are.
The current due process as guaranteed by the judges is nothing like the due process guaranteed by the Constitution.
So, when they wrote the Constitution, I mean, this goes back to Magna Carta, right?
When they wrote the Constitution, they were talking about if you get charged with something, you get to go before a judge and a jury of your peers.
Due process, as guaranteed by the Constitution, really is the right to be heard in court.
You cannot be forced to answer questions or answer charges anywhere except in a court.
And in most instances, that means with a jury and with the full panoply of procedural rights.
And the problem is that administrative agencies essentially are an end-run around this.
Administrative power can be viewed as an evasion of the Constitution, including both the paths of power and our procedural rights.
So, when that's just so everything is defined, when we're talking about the administrative state, exactly what does that mean?
What does it mean, the administrative state?
Right.
So some people think of it as all executive power, and that sort of blurs the issues.
There's a lot of executive power which is extensive and does not require due process.
And that executive power can include the right to distribute benefits, sometimes with a hearing and sometimes not.
It can include the government's right to determine immigration, which is a hot topic today.
And again, that doesn't always traditionally get due process.
But when the government seeks to control us, to regulate us, to bind us, to impose legal obligation, then it should be acting against us only through the courts of law.
And the due process guarantee is most fundamentally a guarantee that we get to be heard only in a court only and be controlled only in courts of law.
But what constitutes the administrative state?
Is that like agencies like the EPA?
Is that it's the EPA, HHS, all of the alphabet soup of agencies which are substituting themselves for Congress and the courts.
Undoubtedly, the executive can have all sorts of folks advising it, but ultimately, when the executive takes legislative power from Congress and takes judicial power from the courts and tries to make rules and to control us in its hearings as substitutes for court proceedings, it is engaged in what I call administrative power, and this is the power to constrain unlawfully through administrative agencies.
So let's take the EPA as an example then.
What can the EPA do to me that takes away my due process right?
So the EPA, under a statute sometimes known as CERCLA, I won't repeat the full long title, but it's commonly known as CERCLA, can issue a unilateral order limiting your use of land and ordering a cleanup.
Now, my land.
Yes.
Well, if you have some.
I don't know.
Not my land, because I don't own that.
One's land.
Someone's land.
They can just say, you have to clean up your land.
Okay.
Right.
And there's nothing wrong with laws on the environment, and there are nothing wrong with court proceedings applying these laws to individuals.
But this short-circuits all of this.
The EPA acts through regulations, and in this case, it also acts through a proceeding, which is not a court proceeding.
It's just a declaration, an order, as if it were a court.
And that's very odd because it's not a court.
They don't have judges, they don't have juries.
So the EPA sends me a letter saying you have to clean up your property.
And I say, my property is perfectly fine.
And they say, what?
They say, pay us a lot of money.
We'll do it.
They start to fine me in enormous amounts of money.
And I can't then.
The court must pay fines for being obstreperous.
And now I can't appeal that?
Well, one can always appeal these things.
Well, almost always, not always, but almost always one can appeal.
The awkwardness is that when one appeals from any administrative agency to a court, the court is not acting with a jury.
It's relying on the fact-finding of the agency itself.
But of course, the agency is one of the parties.
It's the prosecutor.
And then, of course, you might say, well, at least in the law, questions of law, you get the court's independent decision.
But no, it turns out the courts will defer to the agencies on questions of statutory interpretation, which are most of the legal issues involved.
So the EPA doesn't dispute law or fact.
So the EPA says clean up your land.
I say no.
They say we're going to fine you.
I say, I'm going to appeal.
And the judge says to the EPA, should he clean up his land?
And the EPA says yes.
Is that basically the process?
Yeah, and I don't want to talk specifically about the EPA.
Generally, about agencies.
Whatever the position is taken by the administrative agency, whether through an unilateral order or whether through some sort of hearing, eventually, if one gets to court, there's a prejudice in favor of the other party, namely the government, on both the law and the facts.
And that violates due process of law, right?
Because if anything's required by due process, it's when you get to court, one should have some sort of fairness from the judge, an independent decision, certainly not prejudice in favor of one of the parties.
And that's the effect of judicial deference.
So where are our friends on the Supreme Court about this?
Why aren't they holding up the Constitution and crying foul?
The funny thing is, they spent a century trying to accommodate administrative power, and they did that very successfully.
But the danger is they did it by corrupting the processes of the courts.
They did it by giving up not only on due process when you get to the agency, but due process in the court itself.
And this is terrifying, of course, because it means that you never get due process, not even when you get to the court.
So the Supreme Court itself is saying that the agencies have the right to do this, basically.
Right.
There are cases, Goldberg versus Kelly and Matthews versus Eldridge from the 1970s, which look as if they're expanding the due process because they allow you to process in certain benefit cases.
So my welfare rights cannot be taken from me in some instances without a hearing as a result of these cases.
That's generous, I suppose.
But the danger is that comes with the ability of the government to deny you due process in the courts in constraint cases.
And the worst instance of this actually involves Hamde versus Rumsfeld.
Hamde was an American citizen who went off to fight abroad against the United States.
He was captured, an enemy combatant, and they just put him in the brig.
They didn't give him a trial.
He had a right to be tried for treason.
But the Supreme Court said that's just fine as long as there's an neutral administrative decision that, in fact, he was an enemy combatant.
And so, poof, there goes your right to a jury trial even in cases that involve personal liberty.
What's the Chevron ruling?
We're always hearing about the Chevron case.
So, Chevron's a 1984 case in which the Supreme Court said that judges not only may, but typically must, defer to the interpretation of a statute issued by an agency.
So, where a statute authorizing an agency is ambiguous, an agency can issue an interpretation, and the judges have to follow that.
Now, this is very strange for many reasons.
One reason is ambiguity in a statute is not authorization to make a rule, and the agencies use chevron interpretation to basically legislate in the absence even of congressional authority.
They make rules that have no even authorization on the statute.
But even more disturbing is when the judges then get a case in front of them, the government is a party, the courts will defer to the agency, in other words, the government's legal position.
I see.
So, this is very odd, right?
So, if you think about in any legal case, there are two types of issues: there are questions of fact and questions of law.
And it turns out, on both of these, the judges will show favor to the government.
So, where do you get the independent of a judge or due process?
Right.
So, I mean, that's what happens when that's what Obama was trying to do when he was talking about transgenders using bathrooms.
He was reinterpreting that law to mean sex discrimination.
Okay.
Right.
And Title IX, too.
Right.
So, I only have time for two more questions.
The first is, how do you feel about the possibility of fighting back, I guess is what I should ask?
Is there any chance to fight back?
Right.
So, I long thought that my role is simply as a scholar and just to observe.
But, yes, one reaches a point at which one has to push back a little bit.
And I'm very optimistic about that.
And not necessarily through Congress or the executive, but rather in the courts.
Because when the judges corrupt their own decision-making and violent due process, many of them will hesitate once they're informed that this is happening.
I see.
And federal judges that I talk to are very concerned about this.
Well, that's the Southern Supreme Court, but lower federal judges.
They're very worried about it.
I'm somewhat optimistic.
The judges want to do what's right.
And once it's explained to them that they're actually violating due process themselves, they're very worried.
My last question, I have to ask this.
You're at Columbia University.
I'm not going to label you as a conservative, but you're on City Journal, which is a magazine I love.
And do they know you're there?
And do you have something piled up against that door to keep them from bursting in on you?
You know, I sometimes say that I'm the only out-of-the-closet conservative at the law school here.
Okay.
But I must say, this is a remarkably civilized place, and I get along very well with my colleagues.
And so I have no complaint about that at all.
They've all been very generous.
Can I get back to the point about pushing back and fighting?
Yes.
One of the things I'm doing actually is starting up a new civil liberties organization that will be fighting administrative power.
And we hope to litigate this.
That's great.
Does it have a name yet or a website?
It's the new Civil Liberties Alliance.
Excellent.
Have you set up a website?
I'm going to push back vigorously.
Have you set up a website yet or anything?
We have not set up anything yet.
So shh, don't tell anyone.
Well, let us know.
We'll promote it.
Thank you very much, Professor.
Why Not Tell?00:06:34
I appreciate your coming on.
It's an honor to be on your show.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Excellent.
Philip Hamburger, the Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
If you get a chance, you can probably now read his piece online at City Journal.
I think it's cityjournal.org or city/slashjournal.org.
Just Google it and you'll find it.
Really, really interesting piece.
And like I said, when you read it, people will think you know something, even which, obviously, since you're listening to my show, that can't possibly be true.
Stuff I like.
We're talking about political art about oppression.
And here is one that is really, really interesting.
It's as interesting for the movie itself as for what happened to the movie.
Not Without My Daughter was a movie with Sally Field and Alfred Molina, his name is right, Alfred Molina, 1991.
It is based on the true story of Betty Mahmoudi, who married an Iranian doctor, I think he was, and went back with him, she thought, temporarily to Iran and found out not so fast.
Sally Field plays a lady who goes over with her husband to Iran and suddenly finds that men with machine guns are coming up to her and forcing her to cover every strand of her hair, every strand that she shows, they tell her is a dagger in the heart of Iranian men.
And so she says, well, let's go home, honey.
And not so fast.
He says, well, we don't have a passport.
And here is that scene.
How could you not take care of the passports?
Didn't somebody tell you about this, Moody?
How could you let this happen?
It's a mistake.
Nobody thought about it.
Well, then we'll go to the airport and we'll tell them we didn't know about the three-day requirement.
Maybe they'll just let us through.
And if not, we'll just sit there and we'll wait for the next flight.
I don't know how to say this to you.
We're not going back.
We're staying here.
What do you mean?
How long?
I want to get a job here in a hospital.
What?
I want us to live in Iran.
No.
No.
There's nothing for me in America.
Are you crazy?
We're Americans.
Your daughter's an American.
Moody, how do you upset about your job and everything?
I understand that we're going to go back today and we're going to fix it.
I want Mata to grow up here.
I think she should become a Muslim.
No!
You lied to me.
You lied to me.
You held the Quran and you swore to me that nothing was going to happen.
Mumi!
You were planning this all the time.
You lied to me.
How could you not take care of?
Obviously, this movie would not get made today.
And here's why.
Okay, it came out.
And here's Vincent Camby, who was the mate at the time, 1991, he was the big reviewer for the New York Times.
Here's his opening.
Not Without My Daughter, a title that sounds like a line from a traveling salesman joke, is the first major clinker of the year.
It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn.
It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.
Camby later admitted in retirement that this was a political review, that he was moved not by the quality of the picture, because it's a very, very moving, very powerful.
I mean, you can see from that film, it's a suffocating story about what it's like to be in Iran after the fall of the Shah and the coming of Islamism.
This happened to Mahmoudi right after the hostage crisis.
Sally Field was nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award, which always gets a lot of press because it's funny about how bad the movie is, but it's not about how bad the movie is.
It's how not leftist the movie is.
I think Dinesh D'Souza won it this year and wore it as a badge of pride as well.
He should.
Alfred Molina, the guy who played the guy, was punched in the face by, I think, an Iranian man who was so upset about it.
The movie, you can read, just the other day, somebody wrote an article called The Problem of Not Without My Daughter, which was essentially complaining about the fact that this picture still exists and people like it because it's a good, good movie.
I'm not going to tell you it's a great movie, but it's a very exciting adventure story, a very desperate, a very honest look at what it's like to live under this system.
And here's what I want to say about this, is that when you're complaining, when conservatives are complaining about the arts, why the left runs the arts, the left runs the arts because the left has built an infrastructure to support the arts.
The left knows that when a picture like this comes out, and like I said, this is a quality movie.
You know, Sally Field is, I think, a two-time Oscar winner, you know, to say that she's the golden raspberry award.
Suddenly her talent drained out of her.
Suddenly she's no good.
I mean, it's a terrific performance.
There's nothing at all wrong with the performance.
So it's only the fact that they own the infrastructure that supports the arts.
You know, you think, well, wouldn't people show up for this?
Well, they don't show up for it because it gets bad reviews.
We all do this, right?
I mean, something like Metacritic, if you go on, if you make a picture, go look at the pictures that are Christian pictures or the anti-abortion pictures.
If you look on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, they get 0% from the critics and 80% from the audience, you know?
So it's like, you know, who are you going to believe?
And so we have not, the conservatives have not, built an infrastructure that cares about the arts, that goes to the movies and says, you know, this is a good movie because of this, but its values are lousy because of this.
All we do is complain.
All we do is complain.
We complain that this is bad and this bad and there's a naked woman and this and this.
And, you know, you cannot save the arts unless you love the arts.
And if you don't save the arts, believe me, they will pollute the minds of the young.
So here's a terrific movie.
You should watch it.
You'll really enjoy it.
Watch it with your family.
Not without my daughter.
Just a really stirring story.
The last shot will make you cry.
And it really is something.
And they did everything they could to kill it.
And they did.
But like the truth, it just won't quite die.
All right, tomorrow is the mailbag.
So that means get your questions in now, or else your life will just continue the way it is.
And look at you.
I mean, come on.
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