Andrew Clavin and Rob Long dissect Bill O’Reilly’s $32M payout to Lise Wills for alleged misconduct, comparing it to Harvey Weinstein’s scandals while criticizing NDAs silencing victims. Long defends Hollywood’s "strategic" use of appearance but condemns Weinstein’s predation, linking Fox News’ Outnumbered to exploitative media culture. Their debate on Trump—rooting for a "monster"—clashes with The New Yorker’s satire critique, while they mock progressive hypocrisy over sexual liberation, predicting a "new Victorian age" of stricter norms. Clavin’s show promises unfiltered answers amid the chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
Bill O'Reilly says he's angry with God about a report in the New York Times that he paid Fox News commentator Liz Weil $32 million to keep her mouth shut about sexual harassment.
God responded that he's kind of ticked off with Bill O'Reilly and maybe O'Reilly ought to watch what he says because the guy is 68 years old and nobody lives forever, just saying.
O'Reilly then took a swing at God and the two ended up rolling around on the barroom floor until O'Reilly discovered he wasn't fighting God at all, but just some guy.
O'Reilly then went home after offering the guy $32 million to keep his mouth shut.
We'll be discussing O'Reilly and whether his sex scandal is different than the Hollywood scandal.
And maybe we'll have time to take a look at this Russian investigation that is blowing up in the face of Democrats.
Here's a montage of the mainstream media covering that story.
Crickets.
And also ricochets Rob Long, who is the executive producer of Kevin Kinwaid.
When you talk Hollywood, you know, the first name that comes up is Harvey Weinstein and then Rob Long, pretty much.
And he's going to come on to discuss Shopiz and his new book, Big Lee, the Poetry of Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and verse make poetry great again.
And yes, he is out of his mind.
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So the New York Times has run this story.
Can we turn this screen off?
It's kind of distracting.
Can you say?
Yeah.
The New York Times has run this story saying that Bill O'Reilly paid out 32 million bucks to keep Lise Wheel, one of the, I think she was a legal analyst at Fox, a very attractive lady, and to keep, have her be quiet about sexual harassment and possibly, they used the phrase non-consensual sexual conduct or something like this.
I mean, which I, exactly.
I was thinking, do you need more than four letters to spell that?
And, you know, I've been thinking about this because I've been hammering Weinstein.
We've all been hammering Weinstein.
We all just assume Weinstein is guilty.
O'Reilly is putting up a defense.
O'Reilly has said repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly he hasn't done anything wrong and that he's got information, but he can't bring it out and all this stuff.
And he just pays this money to make this go away because it's destructive to his family.
Here is O'Reilly talk to Glenn Beck.
This is cut number six, basically saying why he doesn't entirely, can't entirely defend himself.
Number one, I want the story to go away because it's brutalizing my family.
And number two, I'm not going to run and hide because I didn't do anything wrong.
And I think that the evidence that we've put forth is very strong, very compelling, that the New York Times wants to take me out of the marketplace.
This is the second time they've attacked me.
And the article on Sunday regurgitated the first article.
That was like 75% of it.
They had to run it twice in case you didn't get it last April.
And they know that I'm in a disadvantage because I can't comment specifically on any case that has been resolved.
That's one of the stipulations.
Legal, compelling things that when you resolve something, it is always done in a nobody says anything.
And you know who knows that best?
The New York Times.
So David French has a piece at the corner where he says it's time for Bill O'Reilly to be Weinsteined.
In other words, that conservatives should stop running cover for him or staying out of it, and we should treat him the same way that we treat Harvey Weinstein.
And look, my first reaction when I hear that you paid somebody $32 million to keep his mouth shut is my first reaction is to compare that to how much money I've paid people to keep their mouths shut, which is none.
And because there's nobody who's trying to say anything about me because I don't sexually harass people.
And with the exception of Austin, I try to treat.
Yeah, I try to treat people with respect, but nobody would, no court on earth would convict me for disrespecting Austin.
But there is one thing that keeps me from just unleashing on the guy, and that's Glenn Beck.
And actually, this is something I want to talk about.
This is actually, it's a little personal, but here, you know, when I started doing this, nothing could have been stranger or more alien to my personal makeup than coming and sitting in front of a camera and being on a microphone and talking without preparation.
I have lived my life as a writer.
And as a writer, I'm an incredibly careful writer.
Anybody will tell you, you know, I rewrite everything again and again and again until I get it right.
Sometimes when I'm sending it out to the publisher for the last time, I'm still correcting it.
Michael Knowles and I are doing this Another Kingdom, which I hope you'll subscribe to on YouTube.
And as Knowles is performing it, I'm rewriting some of the text because I eventually, I suppose, I'll publish it as a novel as well, you know?
And so I'm rewriting and all this stuff.
The idea that I would come on and just talk off the top of my head, and the stuff I said would then be captured on tape, and anybody could listen to it.
You could basically hold it against me if I made a mistake.
There are only two things so far that I really regret.
And one of them is when James Comey first came into the news, I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
I would not do that today.
That was a big, big mistake.
I mean, James Comey, I now think is a very sinister figure, and I will talk about that if I have time today.
But the other are a couple of jokes I made about Glenn Beck.
And Beck has never said a word about this to me, and I don't want anything from Glenn Beck.
I'm just saying this out of my own personal feelings.
You know, it's easy for me to make jokes about Glenn Beck, because Glenn has a natural person.
I worked for Glenn for about six months, and I really like the guy.
I like the guy a lot.
And he has a natural personality where any event that happens, he can sort of connect the dots to the worst possible outcome.
I mean, that's part of his charm and part of his show.
And I have the opposite personality, which is that anything that happens, I can connect the dots.
It's going to be fine.
It's just a personality thing.
I would tease Glenn to his face when I worked with him.
I would tease him on his own air, and he never objected to it and all this stuff.
But I felt when I first came on, I said, I made jokes about it without realizing the power of the microphone, without even realizing I was actually talking to actual human beings.
And I just really regret it because Glenn is a five-star character in my book.
I mean, I worked with him.
I worked around him.
I worked with the people who worked with him.
And a lot of people in this business are, you know, a lot of the women in this business are very attractive women.
They loved Glenn.
They spoke about Glenn the way I would hope people who worked for me would speak about me as a mentor and a friend and a supporter.
And not one of them ever said, oh, and don't go in a room alone with Glenn.
There was nothing like that ever, ever.
So the fact that Glenn Beck, so I just want to say that, Glenn, if you ever hear this, I'm sorry.
I didn't know what I was doing.
It's just the way, you know, we all have to learn.
We all have to learn, go on our learning curve.
But anyway, the fact that Glenn Beck is standing up for O'Reilly is the only thing that gives O'Reilly any credibility at all in my book.
Because, you know, listen, I feel 100% certain that if O'Reilly has done anything bad, Glenn Beck has never seen it.
And as a good and loyal friend, he would stand up for his loyal friend, having no proof of it.
So it's, you know, Glenn is not this positive proof that O'Reilly is innocent, but it's the only thing that gives me hesitation because if you've paid, as the New York Times says, up to $45 million in hush money to people, and O'Reilly has not denied this.
He just basically is saying, well, I'm a big target and I have to make things go away.
Now, he says, he says that Media Matters targeted him.
That happened to Glenn, by the way.
Media Matters, what Media Matters does, it's a Soros Corporation, what's the guy's name, Brock, David Brock, who is this left-wing hitman, basically, you know, obviously not a literal hitman, but David Brock runs Media Matters.
And what he does is he assigns somebody, if he feels that you're getting in the way of his guys, Clinton or Obama, he hires people to listen to every single word you say.
And then when they catch you saying something, and we all say untoward things, we're making jokes, we're talking off the top of our heads, everybody says stuff.
Remember, who was it they got?
They got him so fast.
Don Imus, he made a joke about a girls' basketball team and he said something, oh, they're nappy-headed hoes, you know.
And that was Don Imos.
Imos had been saying stuff like that forever.
Is that an offensive thing to say?
Yeah, you know, it's transgressive humor, it's out there, it's all this stuff.
But what they do then is they build it up and they get some commentators to commentate on it, they get some op-ed people to write about it.
And, you know, even a person who might like Don Imus says, yeah, that was kind of going over the top.
Then Imus comes out and apologizes, and when he apologizes, they've got him.
Because then they start to say, oh, you're guilty, you're guilty, you're guilty, and they chase him down.
And they did that to back, you know, like I said, everybody says things that they wish they hadn't said, but they just listen to you and listen to you and listen to you.
And then they organize sponsor boycotts.
And so that's what O'Reilly is saying happened to him.
But, but this 45 million bucks, you know, what are you paying people to be quiet about for that kind of money?
That does not make any sense to me whatsoever.
And the thing about these non-disclosure agreements, you know, this is a big thing that's coming out now with the Harvey Weinstein thing.
People sign non-disclosure agreements.
I don't even remember if I signed one here, but most of us sign them because, you know, you don't want to, you don't want somebody, let's say I get in a fight with Jeremy, the God King of the Daily Wire, and he says, get out.
Now I'm bitter and I say, oh boy, every day I worked there was hell.
You know, everybody was dishonest.
Suddenly I just, you know, I'm taking out revenge.
You know, they don't want you doing that.
And well, they shouldn't because people get angry.
But a non-disclosure agreement that keeps you from reporting a rape, I mean, first of all, you shouldn't really sign that, you know, because the guy who, the guy who did that, the guy who did that to you, I mean, if you're taking even $32 million, look, I guess we can all be bought, and $32 million is an awful lot of money.
But if somebody actually assaulted you, he's going to do that again.
I mean, you're taking $32 million to be quiet while somebody else down the road does this.
And now, I mean, look, this is all coming unleashed in Hollywood.
I don't know if you're following this, but there's this minor director, James Toback.
Do you know James Toback?
I mean, he directed one film.
Yeah, one film back in the 90s was his big film.
But he's kind of this, he's like this, you know, kind of unattractive, big overweight guy.
And he would go out in the park and tell people he was a director and get them to come back to his hotel room and all this stuff.
And the other one, the big guy, is David O'Russell.
He's the guy, he's a really good director.
He made Silver Lining's playbook and all this.
But this is the thing.
Blaming Powerful Men00:14:33
This stuff is coming out now, but it's been coming out all along.
I mean, David O'Russell, Amy Adams, after she made American Hustle with him, came out and said, Oh, it was terrible.
He berated me.
He made me feel bad.
And Jennifer Lawrence was in that movie too, and she was tough and she would stand up to him.
The story about Three Kings, which is an excellent film, David O'Russe, I think that's his first movie, and that had George Clooney.
The story is that George Clooney got into an actual fist fight because he was so, and it speaks well of Clooney, he was so abusing the lesser directors on the set that Clooney, the star, said, Hey, if you're going to abuse somebody, abuse me.
And they ended up rolling around in the dirt, punching each other.
So this stuff is everywhere.
And I mean, you know, it's going on.
They had a report that is going on in Sacramento, the state capital of California, that the government people there are harassing women.
There was a report recently in Washington, D.C., that the STDs are rampant in Washington, D.C.
So you know stuff is going on there, and we know what happens with interns and stuff like that.
So it really is happening all over.
And I think as conservatives, we obviously have to say, look, there's a special pleasure, obviously, that the left gets, for instance, if an anti-gay pastor is found in a homosexual liaison.
The left will cover that endlessly, and it gives them a special glee.
And I admit, I am not above this.
When I see Harvey Weinstein, this major, major Democrat donor, this guy was covered up that everybody covered up for, you know, and it's just had all the most powerful friends basically paying off.
You know, people are kept silent by the fact that he's giving them money.
I feel the same kind of thing, a special kind of glee at this.
But I think Bill O'Reilly owes it to the people who have listened to him moralize, because that's what O'Reilly is.
O'Reilly's not necessarily conservative.
He's a populist, and he's a moralizer.
And he wagged his finger at us for 20 years on TV, and he said, this is what's right, and this is what's wrong.
And I think he owes us better than I paid people off to keep them quiet, to protect my poor little children, and media matters and stuff like that.
I think we should know.
I think he should release them from their agreements.
I think he should let Lise Wills talk.
You know, Megan Kelly is complaining.
O'Reilly said that no one has complained about him.
And Megan Kelly went on her show.
She is kind of doing it in private because nobody's watching her show.
But she went on her show and said, that's not true.
I know it's not true because I complained.
And she read part of an email that she had written to Fox News.
Here's that.
I wrote an email to the co-presidents of Fox News, Bill Schein and Jack Abernathy.
An email I have never made public, but I'm sharing now because I think it speaks volumes about powerful men and the roadblocks one can face in taking them on.
I wrote in part, perhaps he didn't realize the kind of message his criticism sends to young women across this country about how men continue to view the issue of speaking out about sexual harassment.
Perhaps he didn't realize that his exact attitude of shaming women into shutting the hell up about harassment on grounds that it will disgrace the company is in part how Fox News got into the decade-long ALS mess to begin with.
Perhaps it's his own history of harassment of women, which has, as you both know, resulted in payouts to more than one woman, including recently, that blinded him to the folly of saying anything other than, I am just so sorry for the women of this company who never should have had to go through that.
So the other thing about this is, of course, it always comes down to the women and this sexuality.
You know, I always say sexual abuse is a crime for which every man has a motive.
You know, we all want what women have.
And like, so if you have power, there's a great motive to abuse that power with women.
But the thing about these guys, a lot of these guys, is they mistreated everybody.
And Harvey Weinstein, really, you know, Matt Damon was on, and Matt Damon was saying, let's listen.
I have a cut of Matt Damon, whose career was made by Harvey Weinstein.
And so he's a young actor.
He's coming up.
You know, he gets this big break with Goodwill Hunting, a Weinstein company.
And he talks about what he knew and what he didn't know.
You had to spend about five minutes with him to know that he was a bully, he was intimidating.
That was his legend.
That was his whole kind of M.O. Like, you know, could you survive a meeting with Harvey?
Could you survive?
Could you stand up for yourself with Harvey?
And the people who worked for him were like, you know, I'm coming here to make good movies.
Miramax was the place, really the place that was making great stuff in the 90s.
So when people say like, everybody knew, like, yeah, I knew, I knew he was, you know, I mean, he was proud of that.
You know what I mean?
That's how he carried himself.
And I knew he was a womanizer.
You know, I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, but like, I'm not, you know, it's not my business, really.
But this level of criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought was going on.
Absolutely not.
I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben because he was with her after Brad.
And so I knew that story.
Well, you know, so you knew enough.
I mean, the point is, I'm not blaming Matt Damon.
I'm not blaming it.
I don't think you should blame all the people around these things.
You know, if you weren't there, if you didn't witness it, if you didn't see it, you did not have the power to bring the guy down.
And then there's no point in just spreading that, you know, pointing around the people you dislike because of their politics or whatever.
But the point I wanted to make is that the culture that makes that allows powerful people to behave badly toward other people is kind of the problem because women are obviously going to be the natural target of powerful men.
But basically, everybody is the target of powerful men.
And when you hear me, as I often do, attacking Donald Trump for his manners, for his blame, even though I keep saying I love some of the stuff that the guy is doing and I kind of love the fact that he's breaking the, you know, he's breaking the dishes in the Washington kitchen and all this stuff.
This is the stuff that we as conservatives should be speaking about because this is not a way, you know, it's not the way we want people to be treated.
It ain't right.
It ain't right.
And we should stand up against it, whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Harvey Weinstein.
Speaking of abusive Hollywood characters, Rob Long is about to join us, but first we have to say goodbye.
I'm joking.
We have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
You can come over to the Daily Wire and watch the rest of the show.
You can actually subscribe to YouTube and listen to the rest of the show.
But if you want to watch the show, the whole show from beginning to end, you've got to subscribe at thedailywire.com.
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For a lousy 100 bucks, you get a year subscription and the leftist tears tumbler, which keeps your leftist tears cold or warm or however you like to drink them.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So speaking of Harvey Weinstein, we move right from one abusive Hollywood character to another.
Rob, how you doing?
What the hell?
What's that all about?
First of all, what am I claving?
By behind the paywall now?
You tell people, oh, by the way, the show's over.
But if you want to stick around.
They were jumping like rats off a ship anyway.
I want to see the data.
I want to see your big data, if you don't mind.
First, I have to say, not only are you the creator of Ricochet, one of the best moderate right-wing sites, where Another Kingdom is now playing, you are also now, I can't believe this, I can't believe you have an actual job.
You are the executive producer of Kevin Can Wait, the Kevin James It's a Hit comedy show, and we'll talk about that.
Yeah, as of this morning, we did really well.
We were on last night.
We grew something at 10% where we're supposed to be.
And next Monday, we move to 8 p.m.
Does this mean?
We're not at 9, we'll be at 8.
All right.
This doesn't mean I have to be nice to you now, does it?
No.
No, because let's be honest, what do you have?
10 viewers?
No, I can only be here because I'm your friend.
I had a lot of viewers before you came on.
You're also the author of Big Lee.
Donald Trump in Verse, and we'll talk about that.
But before we talk about that, first we have to talk about, well, you know what, since I was talking about Harvey Weinstein, we got to go into this.
I mean, you are a Hollywood guy.
You have been around here.
Certainly, you've been around here longer than I have.
You were the chief writer on Cheers.
You're one of them.
One of the head writers on Cheers.
This is basically, when people complain this is what Hollywood is like, that's kind of a fair complaint, isn't it?
I don't know if it's a fair complaint.
I mean, I don't know whether why they get separated into two things.
There's one, which is that the idea that you can game the system somehow if you're the Harvey Weinstein.
You know, you're a four-foot-tall, 300-pound man.
And if you're putting people into movies, I mean, you get to, you don't get to, but there's a tendency to push people around.
And there's a tendency to use the casting couch, right?
That's why we call it the casting couch.
It's not new.
Everyone acting like, oh, they're so shocked by this is really suspect.
I am not blaming the victim.
You know, there's cases of assault that should be investigated.
They should book at the guy.
If you're an attack, and I notice that all the women are attractive, right?
If you're an attractive young actress and you wanted to part in a movie and you thought by being nice to Harvey Weinstein, you'd get that part, that doesn't make you suspect.
That makes you smart.
That's actually, you know, attractive people get to go on TV on screen, right?
That's, you know, watch CNN.
They don't put unattractive people on there.
They took Candy Crowley's show off the air, right?
So, like, that's what it is, right?
That's what we want to watch on screen.
So, if you feel like you could be nice to him and maybe flirt with him a little bit and make the four-foot-tall, 300-pound man feel like he's attractive, just short of doing anything that would compromise your deeper moral beliefs or your person, right?
And then Harvey Weinstein said, no, no, my boundaries are different from yours.
My boundaries are farther.
It isn't as if what he did was way out of left field crazy behavior.
I mean, I'm going to get in big trouble for saying this.
It's that he pushed it too far.
Because any attractive actress who was up in his hotel room, I mean, she didn't expect to get groped, and she didn't deserve to be groped, and she didn't expect to get raped, and she deserved to be raped.
That's assault, and there's no excuse for that.
But she was flirting with him.
Like, no person goes, you know, I mean, in this specific instance, because we're talking about criminal behavior or even like beyond the pale behavior, she did attractive people in Hollywood use their attractiveness to get places.
That's right.
So there's no question.
I'm not saying they should throw the book at him.
I'm not saying, I just, I think that we would all be better and we probably actually have more progress in this area if we were more honest.
Yeah.
I think what happens when these things explode is people decide they're going to be outraged by all behavior.
And what that really ends up being is you're outraged by no behavior.
You know, we have this sort of general bloodletting and we fire two or three executives and then because we went so crazy, we don't pay attention to the signs when they are in front of us.
You know, it is, I know you're not blaming the victim and it is true.
I mean, when women come into audition for parts or be interviewed, they wear low-cut dresses, they lean forward, they touch your knee.
There's just no question about this.
I mean, at Fox News, I once told Greg Gutfeld that Fox News was like Bizarro High School where the smart, ugly guys get the pretty girls, you know, instead of real high school where the good-looking guys are.
Yeah, it's true.
It's true.
And I have been on Fox News programs where I literally could not look down because I was afraid I would be looking down the front of a girl's dress that was cut so low that, you know.
We're so high.
Yeah, Fox News is great because they have that show Outnumbered, which has, you know, four attractive women.
So somehow Fox News is the only show, the only network where they can have all women on a show, and it still is vaguely sexist.
You know, it's like a little bit.
But we have to bring up the fact that on Kevin Kinwaite, we're talking about guys who have abused women, but you actually killed a woman.
I mean, you actually murdered.
I mean, you had this poor girl, Erin Hayes, was Kevin James' wife, right?
And one day, one day, Leah Rimini from his old show comes on, and the audience liked her, so you just killed off this woman.
I mean, that's fair, right?
Well, first of all, we didn't kill off Leah.
She's a character.
Okay, so the actress is still alive, you're saying.
She's still around.
She's a great actress.
She's a lot of fun, and she's very, very talented.
Okay.
Look, but this is a business, right?
And it's a business that's very expensive.
So it's hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
And you want to give the audience the chemistry that gets them to come back every week.
And we didn't have that.
And sometimes you don't know you didn't have it.
And you have to make a decisive decision.
You have to make a decision that you were going to go for some great chemistry.
Leah was available.
She and Kevin get along.
They have a long history on TV.
And we felt like this was a way to recapture a little bit of that.
You know, they have kind of a Tracy Hepburn thing going.
So, you know, you want to recapture that.
They're not romantically involved in the new series.
It's not King of Queens.
It's different.
But these two people on screen have incredible chemistry.
And you'd be crazy not to.
I mean, what's weird is that people keep saying you killed her.
The character is, he is a widower.
But he wasn't a widower.
They did this on Blue Bloods, too.
They killed off one of the characters.
He died.
Yeah, it's a good thing to do to refresh a series.
Nobody really died in real life.
Everyone in real life was paid very handsomely.
Well, I feel better about that.
And as long as she doesn't turn up.
No, as long as she doesn't turn up in a shallow grave, I'll let you off the hook for this.
No, no, no.
This is television.
It's like there's no actual consequences to anything.
No, good.
That's the world I want to live in.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, exactly.
Because you're a cuck.
Exactly.
Now, you're a cuck.
You are a major.
Loose With The Truth00:06:52
You wrote this book bigly, which I have to admit.
No, I did not write it.
I edited it.
You edited this book bigly, where you've taken the speeches and comments of Donald Trump and arranged them as poetry.
And I have to tell you, it's genuinely hilarious.
I mean, it had me laughing out loud.
I will give a poetry reading if you don't mind.
Here is Donald Trump.
Yeah, for the first time.
High Society by Donald Trump.
I have Palm Beach.
I have Mar-a-Lago.
I deal with society.
Society loves me and I can act differently for different people.
I mean, that's profound.
That basically takes poetry to a new place.
You know, it's funny because you and I probably differ a little bit on Trump.
I'm not a fan.
Right.
But I, in many ways, I'm kind of like you, and I end up cheering a lot and sort of hating myself sometimes for cheering.
But look, the guy, whatever you think, you love him, you hate him.
He's got a singular way of making himself understood, a singular way of communicating.
And so I just sort of wrote one speech out.
I just laid it out.
And the rule was for me when I laid it out on a page, I would not add any words or subtract any words or rearrange them.
So this is just as it came out of Trump's mouth.
Right.
And there is a kind of a rap star rhythm to it, kind of a call and response kind of rhythm to it, especially in the middle, in the beginning when he's a little bit tight, you know, and he's kind of trying to stay on target.
And at the end, when he suddenly has to remind himself he's got to get back on target, that's not as interesting.
But in between, when he's kind of just going cut and loose, it's just like it's right out of the poetry brain.
It gets really interesting.
And a lot of it, sometimes it gets really revealing.
He is not, you know, people say he lies.
Yeah.
And that's probably true.
Objectively, he has a very loose connection to the facts.
But he's not deceitful.
It's not as if he knows that he's not telling the truth.
He really thinks it's the truth.
He really does.
So when he's, the poems really do feel like they're right from him.
I mean, the one I like the best is the shortest one.
It's called, I think it's called The Pope, which is The Pope, I hope, is frightened only by God.
Now, Claven, you think about that.
No, I know.
My eyes filled as you would.
That actually is pretty deep.
I have an English major.
I got a bachelor's in English literature.
And I probably spent, you know, several, you know, add it all up, several weeks of my lifetime writing and thinking about poems that had less resonance and value than that.
Than that, absolutely.
I think he has reworked the American literary scene.
There's no question about it.
Yeah.
But you have been.
I mean, you have been like, I kind of, I feel with Trump sort of like a guy who doesn't like Japanese people watching Godzilla.
I feel like I'm rooting for the monster, and I sort of, I know I shouldn't be, but I just kind of like watching CNN go running through the streets screaming in Japanese.
But you have been consistently critical.
Yeah, I don't like him.
I don't, but I live in a world, I live in a very much darker world, I think, than you do.
And I don't believe that we are somehow or the world is somehow organized so that we are entitled to a good choice.
Right.
So I was at a bar on Friday night.
You'll be surprised here.
I was at a bar Friday night.
In Manhattan.
You were still in a bar Friday night, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
In Manhattan.
And I was sitting there waiting for some friends to arrive, and there's a couple people next to me, and they were visitors from Idaho.
And they were having fun.
They're nice young people having fun.
And so the woman there, the young woman there was like, hey, so what do you do?
And I never, I always lie.
I'd say, I'm a financial journalist because nobody ever asks any questions in a financial journey.
But she's just her journalist, and she wanted to know what I thought of Trump.
And I said, I don't like it.
And she said, yeah, so Hillary would be better?
I'm like, no, I don't think so.
But I just, I don't, we're not entitled to a good choice.
That's the way I feel too.
Yes, no question.
But bad choices is possible.
But this did not stop the New Yorker from ripping you apart for Bigley.
Liberal media.
I mean, all those years of like rhino, squishy, currying favor with the left hand.
You tried your best to buy their favor, but I just love, I love this.
She says, first of all, she accuses you of making your long purpose, she says, is to make fun of poetry itself.
I mean, poetry itself, Rob, for crying.
But then she goes on to say the president.
She's right.
She's absolutely correct.
She says, Big Lee is an example.
I mean, this is the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead in the New York.
Big Lee is an example of expedient political normalization, dressed up in the honorable clothes of political satire.
It is the jocular sanctioning on the part of the right of the right kind of tyrant.
You are a jocular sanctioner.
I refuse to do that.
That was my stage name, by the way.
Yeah, her argument seems to me to be that you are not, that I'm not, in making light sport of him, the way humorists have been making light sport of all presidents at the beginning of time, the way people who loved and adored Reagan as I did would make fun of the fact that he's old and kind of every now and then seem to lose the thread of things, or George W. Bush not really being able to put two or three sentences together, any of that stuff.
She seems to think that Trump is beyond that, that it's not okay to make fun.
That's why we always make fun of president.
That it must always be driven by some sense of outrage.
And also, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, what is this?
You're normalizing him.
I mean, he's president of the United States.
It's normal.
I know.
That is normal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you may not like it.
I'm not crazy about it myself, but it is true.
I saw it on TV.
It didn't happen.
He's president.
He's in the White House.
It's true.
It is normal.
You may hate it, but what's funny to me is that the people who complain so much that he's loose with facts and all that stuff are incredibly loose with the language.
What do you mean to normal?
What does normalize mean?
It means that we're not always waking up saying, this is outrageous.
You can't live in that world.
Unless, of course, you're getting paid to by the New Yorker.
And unless I think even more so, you feel that there are zero consequences to your outrage.
Right.
Like, it's like, it's a pose.
Well, that's the thing.
I mean, you're surrounded by people who absolutely agree with you.
So speaking truth to power is not speaking truth to power.
It's just speaking to your friends.
Wearing Socks and Speaking Truth00:03:21
Rob Long.
Seeing truth at a fancy restaurant.
Am I done?
You're done.
Get out.
Get out.
I'm just making a kind of a noise like Rob Wong.
I'm nice.
I only have, I can't be here forever.
I got feelings.
I got things to do.
Hey, I'm a busy, busy man.
Yeah, I don't think so.
So, because you could put on a college shirt with this.
I knew you were coming.
I wanted to look hip in Hollywood, you know.
What do you think?
I like it.
I actually like it.
The beard, yeah, no, excellent.
Excellent.
Because I look older than you.
However, when I see you on Gutfeld, you're not wearing shoes.
You're not wearing socks.
I'm not wearing socks.
Socks.
Yeah, put the socks on.
Yeah.
That's like, I mean.
That's more of a casual shoe.
You're making me ashamed.
I will be wearing socks now that the socks are seasonable.
No.
Like, you have to.
I'm a guy who like in the seasonal wardrobe.
I just want to know: are you wearing pants now?
That's what I want to know.
Wouldn't you like that?
All right.
The author of Big Lee, the executive producer of Kevin Can Wait, and the founder of Ricochet.
So actually, almost an accomplished human being.
It's like I'm part of the establishment.
Yeah, part of the G-OPE.
It's good to see you.
I hope you come back sometime.
All right.
I'll talk to you.
See you soon.
Bye.
All right.
So I love the guy.
I have to say, I worked on a project with him, and it was, I can't name the people involved because they were famous comedy writers.
And for some reason, it was famous comedy writers and me.
And we were writing about, what was it, Obamacare?
We were doing some satires on Obamacare.
And first, you have to understand that TV writers never write anything.
Like, I'm a novelist.
I write things.
I stand with my hands on the thing.
But that's not what happens.
So they say, you know, like, go, each one does a script, and this is your script, and this is your script.
And there's like four of us, I guess.
And these are big guys, I mean, guys with big shows.
And we all go out, and one guy comes back with a script.
Who do you think it is?
Me.
Because when you tell me to write something, right, I write something.
You pay me to write it.
I write something.
Everybody else comes back with like a napkin with a scrawl something on it or like a piece of notepaper, like a little piece of toilet paper.
And each guy in turn, I guess this is how a TV show is written.
I've never worked on a TV show.
Each guy hands his little scrap to Rob, and Rob kind of looks at it and then just starts to vamp, just starts to talk.
And I don't know if you've never worked in comedy, you don't know this, but what comedy people do is they never laugh.
They say, good line.
Oh, that's funny.
Good line.
Yeah.
No, I like that.
That's funny.
This is no laughing.
I was in tears.
I mean, I was doubled over, like tears streaming.
I was laughing so hard because he just would ad-lib what he thought the video would be.
And then when he was done, the guy would go home and write what Rob said.
And that's what they do.
They never do anything.
It's just an amazing thing.
They never sit there.
You know, like me writing is like you scratch your chin, you kind of look around, you take pace, then you sit down.
No, no, it's just they talk.
He just talks and it's hilarious.
And then they go and write that down.
That was the experience of comedy.
That's my one experience of comedy writing.
All right, let us move to sexual follies.
So I keep seeing the girl going across, but other people have seen me, right?
Going, why can't I see me?
I think that's funny yet.
I forgot to change it.
Need Mailbag Revolution00:07:16
This place.
This is, see, people think I pick on them, but this is.
All right.
That's right.
I'll pay.
Wait, I'll give you $32 million.
Just keep your mouth shut.
So, you know, I have to just look up who wrote this thing because I actually put this down here and I forgot to put down who wrote it.
But this is a piece.
Wait a minute.
I will find it.
Oh, it was in the week.
That's where it was.
Okay.
I'm going to just see if I can get the author's name because I hate not to give him credit.
But in the week, he talked about, wrote an article called The End of Sex.
And here, let me just read a little bit to you, because this is about kind of the stuff we started out talking about, the Harvey Weinstein of it all and the Bill O'Reilly of it all.
He says, I think it is becoming obvious that the progressive dream of a world of casual sex, free from both guilt and consequences, is in practice a nightmare.
It is simply not possible to produce, much less promulgate and insist upon, uniform adherence to a code of sexual ethics that applies to interactions with persons one barely knows, to whom one has no binding obligations, guided only by the barometer that measures the chance of getting your rocks off.
It's almost like, it's almost as if we need some kind of institution where people kind of pledge to be together and take care of one another forever.
And then, like, you know, if they're children, they take care of their children.
And I was like, I don't know.
We should invent something like that.
He says, even the standard of consent, according to which sexual behavior becomes a kind of economic activity governed according to contract law, is not exhaustive enough to account for the infinite variety of situations in which people acting outside ancient constraints might find themselves.
Sex becomes a question of interpreting signals, of arithmetic, of rune casting.
Inevitable signs are going to be misinterpreted often willfully because other people are, frankly speaking, vile.
People are vile.
He says, I am not under the illusion that millions of Americans are only one more hashtag me too revelation from professing belief that fornication and adultery are immoral and the sexual act is only illicit in the context of lifelong marriage.
But I do think that we are approaching a point at which people are getting increasingly fed up with sex, wishing for a broader, more inclusive understanding of what it means to be human than someone who, with permission or having given it, wants to interact in a variety of ways with other people's private parts.
This is a remarkable thing to see anywhere.
And in the week, which is kind of a, it's supposed to be just all the news and all the commentary, but it really is a, it tends to be a left-wing, it tends to slant left, I think.
But it's a remarkable thing to say, see, because it is what conservatives always say.
You know, conservatives say if a thing can't continue, it won't.
If this can't, if somebody says this can't go on, if it can't go on, it won't.
This has happened before, and I have pointed, you know, people always think that the left always loves to say the toothpaste can't go back into the tube.
That's always what the left says.
What they always say is, like, well, let's try this, and you try it, and then they say, oh, well, you can't go back.
You know, there's no going back.
But people do go back.
And I know I bring this up a lot because I happen to be fascinated by the Romantic period, the period between the French Revolution, say, and maybe the end of the Napoleonic Wars, maybe a little after that, 1820, 1825.
This was when people were revolutionary.
They thought, ah, the French Revolution, I mean, they thought it was the age of Aquarius.
They thought this was, everything is going to go.
The church is going to go.
Kings are going to go.
Sexual morality is going to go.
Everything is going to be new.
God, no God.
Forget about it.
It's all going to be fresh, new.
It's all going to be scientific.
It's all going to be reason.
The age of reason has dawned upon us.
And of course, it ended up with the terror in France and World War across Europe as Napoleon invaded just about everybody and his Aunt May.
In that period of time, there were people thinking things very much like what sexual liberated people, sexually liberated people think today.
And I always point to, certainly Byron was sleeping with everybody on earth.
And Shelley was basically saying marriage is a fool's game.
William Blake, the poet William Blake, was saying the same thing.
William Blake was funny because William Blake was faithfully and happily married his whole life, but he was always talking about how marriage was an old-fashioned, restrictive thing.
And you could see why.
You could see why you would marry this person, you couldn't get divorced, you were stuck with this person for life and it was terrible.
Shelley just left a trail of absolute destruction sexually in his way.
After that period came the Victorian age.
It just ran out.
The idea of sexual revolution just ran out.
And it's not so much the illegitimate children.
Though the illegitimate children are a plague in black communities and in poor white communities as well, illegitimate children are a plague because they mean that poverty will go on another generation and one after that and after that.
They are basically at risk for terrible behaviors because they haven't got fathers, because they haven't got a mother who's responsible for them.
And abortion, believe me, doesn't help because abortion has been legal for years and in the time since abortion has become legal, illegitimacy has shot up.
But that's not it.
That is not it.
We are more than our physical selves.
It's that simple.
It is that simple.
We are not what they tell us we are.
We are not a collection of atoms.
We are not a brain that is just flashing messages around automatically for some reason.
We are a spirit capable of engaging with the world in a spiritual way.
And ultimately, ultimately, people figure this out.
And you know who figured it out first?
The people who figure it out first are the educated, well-to-do people who have two parents who teach them these things and who maybe go to church and they figure it out.
And the problem we have now is that they have figured it out because basically well-to-do upper-middle-class people don't have children out of wedlock.
They get married.
They get married when they're ready.
They have children when they're ready.
They do all those things.
But what they don't do is they don't preach it to the poor because that makes them judgmental.
That makes them unhip.
That makes them racist because to say, oh, black people, maybe you should follow bourgeois white people is somehow racist.
I don't believe that is racist.
I think that is what we're dealing with.
And I do think it is amazing that you will start to hear this.
I do believe a new Victorian age is coming with the good and the bad of that.
But I do believe that one of those things is going to be people are going to stop doing what destroys them.
Smart people are going to stop doing what destroys them.
And one of the things that destroys you is random sex.
And it destroys you because it is against your spiritual self.
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