Ep. 2 dissects media bias through satire, mocking 2016 GOP hopefuls like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush while skewering Hillary Clinton as a "rapey communist" and Bernie Sanders as a "dentureface." Andrew Clavin’s fictional rant—recorded in a Ventura bathroom—exposes mainstream media’s leftist storytelling, from racial double standards (white cops vs. Islam’s violence) to feminism’s outdated grievances, citing Christina Hoff Sommers’ critique of Western women’s liberation. The episode ends with a bizarre Peaky Blinders endorsement, leaving Clavin’s political shift from liberal to conservative as the only coherent thread in the chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
From Clavin election headquarters, here's the latest from the campaign trail.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has dropped out of the Republican presidential race, leaving the field to the loudmouth schmuck, the boring guy, the fatso, the other boring guy, that ridiculous one, the Latino dude, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz.
On the Democrat side, the news of Walker's retirement was greeted as a welcome development by both the corrupt old crone and the rapey communist.
Both are carefully watching their own party's ranks and waiting to see if the blithering dentureface is going to throw his hat into the ring or can find his hat or the ring.
Corrupt public union officials also celebrated Walker's retirement.
Public union leader Vinnie the Shiv Strangolone said Walker had shamed himself by interfering with his union before the union had had a chance to prove to the world it could actually choke the life out of an entire state with one hand while chugging a full pitcher of Schlitz with the other.
Mr. Strangolone said, quote, the public unions will not rest until every penny of Wisconsin taxpayer money is unaccounted for.
Governor Walker becomes the second major GOP candidate to leave the race after that one who sounded too much like George W. Bush stepped down because he couldn't find his fake glasses while he was wearing his fake glasses.
The Bush-sounding guy returned to Texas, where he vowed to continue to create jobs until everyone who didn't work in Texas was on welfare paid for by people who do work in Texas.
When told that it already happened, the Bush-like guy walked into a wall, whereupon he realized he had been wearing his fake glasses the whole time.
Meanwhile, the candidacy of desiccated old bat Hillary Clinton continued to falter.
A spokesman for the mainstream news media, Harry the Shiv Strangolone, no relation, said the MSM would continue its tradition of peppering the nefarious Harridan with hard-hitting questions.
To prove the point, Face the Nation moderator John Dickerson slammed the shady Virago with this hardball.
Name three words that describe the real Hillary Clinton.
Rocked by Dickerson's relentless interrogation, the venal vixen replied, I am a real person.
Senate leader Mitch McConnell immediately leaped on the fact that this was five words and pledged an investigation into where she had gotten the extra two words.
Then he apologized and promised to vote for Mrs. Clinton if only she would make that mean Ted Cruz go away.
Democrat Party spokesman Mohamed the Shiv Strangolone stood up for Clinton, saying his party hoped the hideous old battle axe would survive her scandals by illegally hiding her emails, then erasing them before pretending to hand them over to investigators, then lying about it, then pointing out that she was a woman, then lying some more.
Seeing England Anew00:15:13
Strangolone said this strategy might have worked too if Mrs. Clinton just hadn't claimed to be a real person, which, let's face it, no one's going to believe.
In other election news, more controversy from the latest provocative tweet.
This one reading, trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Yaza Yaza, I am, in fact, Andrew Clavin.
This is indeed the Andrew Clavin Show.
Could we hear that?
Could we actually hear that Hillary Clinton clip?
I just want to make sure she actually said that.
I am a real person.
No one's going to buy that.
That is absolutely ridiculous.
I am a real person, and this is a conservative podcast about the culture.
This is going to be an absolutely great podcast, but not today.
We're broadcasting today out of a men's room, and I think in a gas station 20 miles south of Ventura.
But believe me, we are building the most amazing studios.
I think they're modeled on Donald Trump's self-image or something.
So they're just going to be absolutely huge and fantastic.
And this podcast, I mean, this is going to be historic.
People are going to, it's going to make you forget the classic Greek podcasts.
The five podcasts of Moses are going to pale in comparison.
People are going to say, well, you know, the Ten Commandments podcast, I thought was a good one, Leviticus.
It went on and on.
Biblical, a little biblical humor.
I got two guys.
I got one of my guys, one of the producers here is an actual pastor.
The other one is a son of a pastor.
So they're both sitting in the back room going, we're going to hell.
But God has a sense of humor.
That's why he made Democrats, I think.
The angels said to him, Democrats?
He said, I thought they were funny.
I didn't know they would take them seriously.
All right, I think I may have gotten distracted here.
What was I saying?
Oh, yeah.
So we're not really up to speed.
This is going to be a truncated version of the podcast still.
And I am still a little bit wonky from going to England.
I just got back from England, so I'm still on England time.
It's eight hours and 150 years earlier.
I think it's 1 a.m. in 1857.
And I'm still talking a little bit like I was a homosexual.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Now I've insulted the entire country.
We're off to a great start.
We've just wiped the entire mother country under the rug.
You know, when I moved to England, this is true.
When I moved to England back in the 90s, I lived there for seven years in the 90s, I actually had a good friend who was one of my editors at the Village Voice, who was a gay guy, and he said, watch out.
They're all gay.
You can tell by the way they talked.
So I remember that.
That was back in the days when gay people had a sense of humor.
Now they don't anymore, so I don't even understand why we have gay people.
Now I've insulted, oh wait, I already insulted England, so that's okay.
So, you know, going back to England for me, and this is actually true, going back to England for me, it was actually going home, but it's also going back to a place that I didn't stay in.
I made a decision not to go.
So it's actually visiting the life I didn't live and the person I didn't become.
And there's a great ghost story.
One of the things I'll be talking about a lot is ghost stories.
I love ghost stories.
There's a great ghost story called The Jolly Corner by Henry James.
He wrote the famous ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, which has been made to a movie about five times, I think.
But The Jolly Corner is one of his masterpiece ghost stories.
And it's about a guy, his name is Spencer, Spencer Bryden, I think it is.
And he's an American like James, but he goes to live in England like James.
And he doesn't indulge in American commercialism, American vulgarity, American hard work.
He lives a life of leisure, and he becomes sort of a gentleman, an English gentleman, a man of elegance and taste and refinement.
And one day he comes back to New York to take care of a piece of property, a townhouse he owns, on a jolly corner in a street in New York.
And he is in this house and he's working on the house when he realizes the house is haunted.
He chases the ghost all around.
Finally, he confronts the ghost and it's the ghost of himself as he would have been had he stayed in America.
And of course, he's this horrible, you know, broken, you know, scarred, vulgar, commercial American type.
So for me, going back to England is the exact opposite.
I am this horrible, vulgar, scarred, commercial American type.
And I go back to visit the elegant, lovely person I would have been had I lived in England.
I know there's something I actually wanted to talk about today.
I'm just kind of back on all the people I offended, which is, of course, the great thing about being a conservative.
We can just offend everybody and we don't have to do the, you know, I'm sorry, I've offended everybody.
Though I may do that too, just for fun.
What I actually wanted to talk about today was One of the things about moving to a foreign country and living in a foreign country for a little while and also just visiting it is you get to see your own country the way the astronauts saw the Earth when they first orbited the moon.
You remember that famous picture, Earthrise, it was called, the first Apollo mission, I can't remember what number it was that orbited the moon.
They took this picture and the astronaut read Genesis and the environmentalist went insane, you know, we're all going to die because there's a little place that we're lying and it's all going to explode.
And you get to see your own country like this.
And England was where I became a conservative, where I became a believer in God.
I started out as kind of an unthinking liberal.
I won't say I was a devoted Democrat or anything like that, but I was an unthinking liberal.
That was the way I was raised.
And I got to see my country from afar.
I got to see it the way you saw the Earth, from the moon.
And it just changed my entire opinion.
Even leaving for, I was there for about 10 days, looking back on this election, looking back from afar at our election, I was just stunned at the insanity of Hillary Clinton's campaign, the fact that she is this horrible gangstery person who's never accomplished anything, who's been the servant of powerful men her whole life, who has lied and lied and lied, that she's still in this race.
And I was beginning to think about how this happens.
And I was thinking it's really a question of storytelling.
I mean, I'm a novelist.
I've spent most of my life as a novelist.
And you can go on amazon.com and look me up and buy all my novels, which I hope you'll do by the time.
You may have time before this podcast is over, although the way it's going, it may be over in about two minutes.
And I was thinking that this is really a question of storytelling, that novelists like me use the techniques of storytelling to tell fictional stories that convey a truth.
And the mainstream news media expertly uses the exact same techniques that I have learned my whole life and taught myself my whole life to use facts to tell lies.
And the way this happens is through a process of representing things in certain ways.
If you notice, when I was telling the story, The Jolly Corner, I'm talking about a guy, this guy Spencer, whatever his name is.
I think it was Bryden, but he's not just a person.
He's an individual.
He's a whole character.
He's a guy.
You can recognize him.
You read the story and you met him on the street.
You would know him.
But he also represents, he's representative of certain things.
Now, that's what people discuss in English classes.
What is he representative of?
But you can sort of tell he's representative of this English life of leisure and elegance that he takes on and that I left behind, and that the story is representative of a clash between that way of life and the striving, commercial, somewhat vulgar, but also achieving life that Americans are used to and that I came back to find.
And so that story is representative.
The way the mainstream news media works, it's the first rule.
I actually wrote this down because it is an unwritten but absolute rule of mainstream media news coverage in America, that whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative, the same way a character in a novel is representative of something.
When those prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are contradicted by an incident, the incident is considered as an aberration and treating it as representative is considered hateful.
And that's the way the narrative gets controlled, is what do things represent.
So the easiest way to see this is one white cop in a moment of, you know, we may not even know what it is, kills a black thug.
First, the whiteness of the cop becomes representative of all white people.
The blackness of the thug becomes representative of all black people.
It's assumed that the cop was doing something wrong, that he murdered, and that this is an issue.
So Black Lives Matter, start screaming and yelling, look how many black guys are being killed by white thugs.
And it doesn't matter that this is not representative.
But take, for instance, any act of violence by a Muslim.
And I know that doesn't happen too often in the course of an hour, but when Muslims, when Muslims kill people, to say that this is somehow representative of at least a faction of Islam, a representative of something that's going on in this religion, that becomes hateful.
And you get slammed so hard for it.
And what they're fighting for, the reason they're yelling at you, is they're fighting to keep you from telling stories.
They're fighting to keep the narrative out of your hands.
If you can say, well, look, let me just ask a question.
Let me ask a question.
Is Islam violent?
That violence that took place over there, does that represent Islam?
Maybe it doesn't.
Maybe it just represents Wahhabi Islam.
Maybe it just represents some kinds of things.
But at least let us ask the question.
They are so afraid of letting go of that representative quality of storytelling.
And that's why they come down on you so hard.
With Obama, of course, this worked because the idea of the first black president was appealing even to me.
I mean, I would never have voted for Obama, but the night that he was elected, I thought this is going to be a disaster, but for one night, I'm just going to enjoy the fact that America elected a black president.
You can't listen.
You know, some conservatives tell you, oh, well, it's the blacks who are really bigoted, not the whites.
But it's just not true.
The history of treatment of blacks in America is not anomalous.
Everybody was treating people badly for racial reasons.
But we did treat blacks.
The Democrats certainly treated blacks badly in America for hundreds of years.
And so that it actually did carry some weight as a narrative when this black man was elected president.
Hillary Clinton is depending on the same thing.
And there's a reason I think that that's not going to work.
The idea, the narrative we are being sold by feminists is that the same kind of prejudice against women is in operation that has been in operation against blacks.
Christina Hofsomer, one of my favorite feminists of all, she would call herself a feminist.
I would not call her a feminist.
I discovered her when I was in England.
I came back to America and I was walking around New York and I walked into a bookstore, which used to be these things we had that were actual stores with books in them.
Never mind.
And I was looking at the shelves and kind of walking, you know, running my finger along the shelves, which is one of the great things about bookstores.
And I found this book, Who Stole Feminism.
Now, this is back in the 90s.
No one had heard of this book.
I don't think it was ever, I don't think it sold very well.
I don't think it was reviewed very much.
And I took it down off the shelf and I started paging through it.
And I thought, that's everything I think, except with facts attached.
You know, here was a woman who had done the research to find out what was going on.
She has this video from Prager University, wonderful videos over at Prager University.
I know because our friend Jeremy Boring and Jonathan Hay make them.
One, they're not sitting here doing this.
And let's just take a look at the opening of one of Christina Hofsomer's videos on feminism.
Women in the United States and in Western Europe are the freest and most liberated in human history.
And in many ways, they are not merely doing as well as men.
They are doing better.
Women's emancipation is one of the glories of Western civilization and one of the great chapters in the history of freedom.
So why then?
Are those in the women's movement, such as the leaders and members of activist groups like the National Organization for Women, the professors in women's studies departments at our colleges, and many women in the media, why are they still so dissatisfied?
These feminists hardly acknowledge women's progress.
Yes, they can see that some advances have been made, but the fact that most women reject their activist brand of feminism and think of themselves as free is for this crowd proof of just how entrenched patriarchy and inequality truly are.
Women are so oppressed, they don't even know it.
You can cut it there.
She goes on.
She goes on to talk about the way the narrative is being sold to us of women being oppressed, but it doesn't matter.
And the problem is, a lot of us may not know poor black people.
We know that the weight of oppression on black people is real, but we all know women.
We all know women.
And the fact is in the West, women have always been treated well relative to other places.
Of course, we've developed in our consciousness, we've developed in the knowledge, we've developed in technology, which has set women free to do new things, but we're just not going to buy.
You can't sell a narrative when right in front of your eyes every day is the truth, the facts.
So that's why I think this storytelling is not going to work.
All right.
That's all the time I have.
So I'm going to wrap up with what I, the way I want to end the show every day was a segment called Stuff I Like, which is just stuff I like.
It's art, TV shows, movies, video games, anything that I think is really helps make life worthwhile.
And what I want to talk about very quickly is a television show called Peaky Blinders.
And the guy I want to point out is the creator of this show is named Stephen Knight.
And if you haven't followed him, writers for movies don't really aren't as prominently named as writers in novels.
Stephen Knight wrote a wonderful film called Eastern Promises, a tough crime film.
If you love tough crime films, I think it's a classic.
He's got a TV show running now on Netflix called Peaky Blinders about British gangsters right after World War I. Let's take a look at one quick thing.
Here is Sam Neal, one of the great actors dealing with Cillian Murphy, who plays the gangster.
Sam Neal is a corrupt cop, and they're wondering, they're in a bar together before a murder, a hit is about to go down, and Sam Neal begins to wonder if maybe the cop and the gangster are learning a fresh new respect for one another.
Peaky Blinders Grudges00:01:06
Shouldn't you be busy?
When you plan something well, there's no need to lose.
Do you know something?
I actually trust you to do this.
Do you think there might be some measure of respect developing between us?
Ladies and gentlemen, run on the rider.
Please take your name.
Old foes that have grown to admire each other and see each other's professional virtues.
Personally, I think not.
I think not.
While I drink to that.
Not at all.
They just hate each other.
Great show, Peaky Blinders on Netflix by Stephen Knight.
And that's it.
I'm out of time.
The show will hopefully get longer as we go along.
Meanwhile, I set you free.
Go forth to serve mankind with a little sprig of parsley on the side.