Joe Rogan dissects Ben Carson’s WWII gun-rights argument, mocking Democrats’ dismissals of his neurosurgery legacy while defending armed resistance to Hitler. He pivots to Sicario, praising its brutal realism and waterboarding justification, then debunks feminist niceness myths with Christina Hoff Sommers’ data. Sympathizing with Hillary Clinton, he frames her as a hollow political construct—mocking her shifting accents via Bloomberg’s vocal compilations—while warning her authoritarian appeal risks constitutional collapse. Ends by extolling Stephen King’s horror mastery over modern fiction’s fleeting trends. [Automatically generated summary]
Comic actor Seth Rogan has unleashed an intellectual broadside against Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson.
Rogan, the star of the guilt trip in 22 Jump Street, became enraged at Carson, a Yale graduate and neurosurgeon, after Carson, who once made history by separating two Siamese twins joined at the head, apparently offended Rogan, who once got stoned before going on the Howard Stern Show.
Rogan, who smoked so much weed in his office at Sony's studios that the office had to be renovated, took issue with a remark about gun control made by Carson, who climbed out of poverty to become the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University.
Carson, who performed the first intra-uterine procedure to relieve pressure on the brain of a hydrocepholic fetal twin, had remarked that, quote, the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly reduced if the people had been armed.
To this, Rogan, who dropped out of high school, sent out a tweet that read, F you, Ben Carson.
But Carson, who helped develop a radical surgery to stop seizures in infants, managed to withstand the withering intellectual assault from Rogan, the star of you, me, and Dupree, and continued to insist that an armed German populace would have offered heavier resistance to the Nazis.
But Rogan, who says he spent his entire wedding day baked on pot, was not the only intellectual heavy hitter to weigh in against Carson, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Carson, who was awarded the William E. Simon Award for Philanthropic Leadership in honor of his scholarship fund, was also dismissed by Jonathan Greenblatt, who has toadied for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and now heads a Democrat front organization called the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.
Even though Carson had said nothing about Jews in particular, Greenblatt responded to the doctor's comments by saying, quote, the small number of personal firearms available to Germany's Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.
Frankly, I can only agree and wish, as I'm sure Dr. Carson does as well, that the Jews had as many guns as we have here in America under the Second Amendment, because nothing says freedom like dead Nazis.
Greenblatt went on to say, gun control did not cause the Holocaust, Nazism and anti-Semitism did.
A statement that had nothing to do with anything, and indeed was so absurd it almost sounded like some low-level Democrat shill was humiliating himself by trying to argue with a man appointed to the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the medical world.
Now, I don't mean to suggest by any of this that Dr. Carson has a higher IQ than the entire Democrat Party put together.
Pluto from the Popeye cartoons has a higher IQ than the entire Democrat Party put together.
Ben Carson is a lot smarter than that.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Claven.
Not a bunch of hounds, these people.
And this is the Andrew Claven show.
Men vs. Niceness00:05:43
So I saw Sicario over the weekend, the big crime drama with Emily Blunt and Josh Brolin, which I thought was a really good, a really good movie, one of the better crime movies I've seen in a long time.
Terrible title, Sicario.
Jeremy, do you know what Sicario means?
Well, of course I know.
Okay, well, that's what I want.
I just want to make sure, because, you know, the Sicario, I always pronounced, thought it was pronounced the Sicarai, the Sicarai, were rebels, Jewish rebels, in Rome in the first century during the time of Christ, and they carried weapons, small daggers, called Sicari or Sicarai, I don't know how to pronounce it.
They were basically called dagger men, that's what it meant.
And there was for a long time, I think there still is, a strain in scholarship that said Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was in fact, in fact, the Iscariot was a transposition of two letters, and it was really Judas Sicariot, and he was a rebel.
He was a dagger man, and that he had expected the Messiah to come and be a political leader, a rebel and a fighter to take over, take down Rome.
And when Jesus showed up with all this love your enemies guff, he got disgusted and threw him over, threw him under the bus.
I don't even know if scholars still think that.
But anyway, this is absolutely nothing to do with this movie.
I don't think this has a single, there's a single reference in it or any kind of metaphor or anything.
I don't know why it was called that.
I thought it was really good.
And basically, it's about Emily Blunt plays this FBI SWAT team leader who gets roped into a very, very dodgy CIA mission to the border to take down a Mexican drug cartel and Benicio del Toro is in it.
Very, very tough, very violent, very tough.
Has a really tough attitude, which is what I liked about it.
I mean, it reflected my tragic sensibility, which is, I always tell people that my tragic sensibility is the reason I'm so jolly, because I'm not expecting much.
When you have a tragic sensibility, when you know what life is, you put your hope in real things.
Like, I know that my Redeemer lives, and I also know that everything on earth is going to go straight to hell.
And that's kind of reflected in this very, very hard-boiled, very violent movie.
I also have, I mean, I consider myself an expert at being morally nice.
And people on the right are always picking on me because they're always saying, you know, the left does this, we should do it.
And I'm always saying, no, you know, we're actually the good guys.
We have to behave in a different way.
They can shred the Constitution because that's what they're trying to do.
We can't shred the Constitution to save the Constitution.
That doesn't work.
And people on the right are always saying, I'm too nice.
But when it comes to, like when we were waterboarding terrorists, I didn't even see where there was a problem.
So in this, I didn't even, I wasn't, Catholic friends also get very angry because the church is very much against this.
But I couldn't even see where the moral dilemma was.
If you could pour water on a couple of these guys' heads and save some lives, it was a day's, good day's work.
And in this movie, Benicio del Toro plays a guy who pushes the rules to the very limit, and Emily Blunt runs to the movie going, this is awful.
I didn't get where the moral dilemma was.
My wife, I just want to point out, walked out of the movie.
She walked out because it was way too violent.
Much, much too violent for her.
Also, there was this skanky guy next to her who kept groping her.
That was me.
I'm sorry.
It was a momentary lapse of memory.
She was, you know, she didn't like it.
And we were talking backstage yesterday.
And one of the ladies, Candace, who is our office manager, she didn't like it.
And I think it reflects a very male attitude.
I mean, I think it is just, you know, that hard-boiled, tough, really raw attitude.
And the ending, it's a grim picture, is not what women like.
You know, Shapiro and I were backstage.
We were in makeup a couple days ago, and we were talking to a lovely Lindsay, who was putting on our makeup, but it's not to be held responsible for the results.
She can only do what she can.
And Candace, the office manager, and we were talking about what men and women always talk about when men and women are talking, which is they talk about men and women.
They talk about the differences between men and women because that's what everybody's interested in, except for only, this is why feminists are so unhappy.
All the rest of us, like 80% of our joy in life is derived from the differences between men and women.
That's where our joy comes from.
But feminists, that upsets them.
Anyway, Shapiro and I and Lindsay and Candace were all talking about this.
And I've noticed there is this new, it used to be just accepted as given that women are nicer than men.
Girls are nicer than boys.
Now there's this new idea that has come up.
And even Christina Hoffsommers, our favorite anti-feminist, says this is true, that women are not really nicer than men.
And Lindsay's shaking, that's right, we're not nicer.
They're damn straight, we're not.
Women are not nicer than men.
They're only nicer to men.
But they're just as mean when it comes to internexing feuds with other women.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
All my life, it just goes against the evidence of my entire life.
The way you can tell that women are nicer than men, okay, is that women are always telling you how mean they are, and men are always telling you what good guys they are.
I mean, you wouldn't have to say it if it were true, right?
Women are always saying, you know, no, I can be so mean, I can just be a terrible bitch.
Have you ever met a woman who didn't say this to you?
I can be a terrible, terrible, terrible person.
Would you like another cookie?
I can bake some more cookies with that if you're hungry with your coffee.
And then guys are always saying, guys are always saying, hey, I'm an easygoing guy.
Don't Cross That Line00:10:36
I got a long fuse.
I don't, you know, look, I got limits.
There's a line you cannot cross.
I mean, I'm a Yankees fan.
If you support the Red Sox, I will rip your throat out.
But aside from that, I am a decent nice guy.
That's how you can tell.
Women are just nicer than men.
Which brings me to my subject of the day, which is Hillary Clinton.
Don't tell Shapiro I said this, but I have begun to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Hillary Clinton.
I mean, first of all, you would have to explain to Shapiro what the word sympathy means, I know, but I do not know this word for business.
But once he found out who I was feeling sympathy for, I think you'd have to pull him off me.
Here is a piece from the New York Post about what's happening behind the scene in the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Hillary is furious, and while Clinton advisors think that may save her, it's making the lives of those who work for her hell.
A campaign aide says, Hillary's been having screaming, childlike tantrums that have left staff members in tears and unable to work.
She thought the nomination was hers for the asking, but her mounting problems have been getting to her, and she's become shrill and at times even violent.
In one incident, Hillary berated a low-level campaign worker for making a scheduling mistake.
When the girl had the nerve to turn her back on Hillary and walk away, Hillary grabbed her arm.
Hillary's anger may be stoked by fear, but somebody says that this may be a good thing.
The goal is to channel her anger and make her focus on Republicans, not on her campaign aides and fellow Democrats.
Hillary's always at her most effective when her back is to the wall, says one of her longtime political advisors.
After weeks of pounding and pummeling by the press, she's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore.
And that's supposed to help her, which, you know, at this point, does anybody know who Hillary is?
Does anybody actually know what her personality is?
I mean, remember that, remember those books that came out, Where's Waldo, where there would just be like a drawing of like a thousand people and somewhere in there was this guy with a red and white striped sweater and the game was, you know, you would play with your kids and the game was fine.
They should do that with Hillary, where just like a thousand pictures, all Hillary, and you have to pick the one who is really Hillary because who is she at this point?
You know, is she angry Hillary?
Is she Hillary who gets a tear in her eye?
You know, the other day she was on Saturday Night Live.
Do we have that Saturday Night Live?
Suddenly she's mocking cool Hillary.
She was with the comedian Kate something.
I can't remember her name.
And Kate was playing Hillary Clinton and Hillary was playing the bartender.
And they meet in the bar.
Can you just play just a snippet of this?
Rough night.
Yeah, you could say that.
Hi.
I'm Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Great name.
I'm Val.
So Hillary, what brings you here tonight?
Well, I needed to blow off some steam.
I've had a hard couple of 22 years.
Why?
What do you do for a living?
Well, first, I'm a grandmother.
And second, I am a human entrusted with this one green earth.
Oh, I get it.
You're a politician.
Yes.
Yes.
And how about you?
Well, me, I'm just an ordinary citizen who believes the Keystone Pipeline will destroy our environment.
So suddenly she's clear.
Suddenly she's cool.
She's mocking herself.
What she's mocking about herself is that she has no personality.
She's mocking the fact that she's just a created, a created person.
We've all heard the different accents.
One day she's like, I'm just a down-home girl.
And then suddenly she's talking to black people.
She's got that black accent.
You know, it's just embarrassing.
She keeps melting into these different people.
The reason I'm beginning to feel sympathy for her, I may be the only person in America who feels this way, but I have a lot of sympathy for Lindsay Loewen and Miley Cyrus.
People like that.
Paris Hilton.
I watch these people, and I feel that what we're watching with them is we're watching a kind of slow-motion child abuse that we're all being asked to participate in.
I mean, here's Miley Cyrus.
She's never had a personality.
She's never had a childhood.
She's been working, acting, pretending to be somebody all her life.
And now she's grown up.
Same thing with Lindsay Lowen.
She's grown up.
And whenever they tell you that a child actress has grown up, it means she's about to take her clothes off.
And that's basically what grown-up means in Hollywood, for a girl.
For a girl, Hollywood, in Hollywood, grown-up means you're taking your clothes off.
Who are you?
What do you care about?
What do you like?
What's your personality?
What are your dreams for the future?
Doesn't matter.
You want to be a success.
You're taking your clothes off and you're becoming that twerking, you know, just degraded.
I mean, if you ever saw The Canyons with Lindsay Lowen, it's basically a work of pornography.
And here's this girl who was actually kind of talented and cute at one point.
And she's just been debased into this absolutely absent personality.
Hillary Clinton is the political version of this.
And I don't know, I don't want to blame feminism for everything, but somewhere along the line, somebody told her that, you know, first it was Bill's turn to be president, and now it's your turn, without ever questioning if that was something that she wanted, that she was good at, that she had any kind of ability to achieve.
And now she's just this empty vessel wandering through the world, inventing whatever personality she has.
We have this one, there's this thing that was put together by Bloomberg.
I've just her different accents.
Just play that.
It's kind of sad if you listen to it.
It was really silly.
I'm glad nobody was around.
The road to being somebody in this society starts with education.
It is difficult to draw the lines between personal privacy, family privacy.
You know, they've just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor.
You know, I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.
I think that is exactly where it goes.
Right there in the middle on the top.
Questions come up and we'll just keep doing our best to answer them and hopefully it'll end at some point.
When I started this.
The reason I find this sad instead of hilarious, although it's also hilarious, is that this is what the left wants from her.
Listen to this piece by Matthew Iglesias, which may have been, in a way, the most dangerous piece of writing I've seen in a long time.
Matthew Iglesias, he runs Vox, which is now becoming a big left-wing site.
He runs it with someone else, I can't remember.
He talks about the fact Hillary Clinton's emails, I'm just going to read what he says, Hillary Clinton's emails have taught us nothing new about her.
She's not into transparency.
She doesn't like the media, and she's not overly concerned with following the spirit of the rules.
She doesn't care about the rules.
To her critics, that makes her a deeply sinister figure.
This is normally portrayed as a political weakness of hers, and in many ways it is, but it's also an enormous source of potential strength.
Now listen to this for a minute.
This is the left speaking directly into the mind of Hillary Clinton.
Committed Democrats and liberal-leaning interest groups are facing a reality in which any policy gains they achieve are going to come through the profligate use of executive authority.
And Clinton is almost uniquely suited to deliver the goods more than almost anyone else around.
She knows where the levers of power lie, and she is comfortable pulling them.
Procedural niceties, be damned.
Procedural niceties translates into the Constitution.
That's what they want from her.
They want this empty vessel of power.
And that's what she's become.
And it's kind of the weird destruction of a human being.
Of course, if she becomes president, it will be an absolute disaster.
But for now, when I'm still hoping she's going to be destroyed by her own dishonesty, I can afford to feel sorry for her.
All right, that's all I have to say.
Today I'm going to move on to Halloween stuff I like.
Now, I've been trying, I try really hard with stuff I like to present stuff that you haven't read or movies you haven't seen.
And so it seems a little strange to talk about Stephen King because everybody's seen, done, and read everything that he's done.
I have my own take on Stephen King.
I found Stephen King before he was famous.
My wife and I were just starting out.
We didn't have two cents to rub together and we couldn't afford to go to the movies.
And so I came up with what I thought was a great idea.
I said, you know, why don't we just get a book and we'll read to each other from a book every night and that way we won't have to spend money to go to the movies, but we'll have some entertainment value.
So I didn't want to get a literary book, something like that.
I want to get something just entertaining.
And I just ran into the store in a rush, saw a book that had a really cool cover.
It was all black and just had a drop of blood on it.
I thought, that looks cool.
Never heard of the author, Stephen King.
Nobody had ever heard of him.
The movie Carrie hadn't come out yet.
Brought this book home, had dinner, maybe it's 6.30, 7 o'clock.
We sit down to read this book.
And the idea was that for the five bucks it cost to get a paperback, we would have entertainment for weeks.
I start reading this thing, four o'clock in the morning.
I'm still reading and I've lost my voice.
And we're so terrified we can't go to sleep.
You know, this is Salem's lot.
We're so scared we can't go to bed.
So it says, we just keep reading.
Finally, it was just the kind of dust coming out of my mouth.
Dust and ash was coming out.
For months and months afterward, I would ask my friends, have you ever heard of this guy, Stephen King?
Nobody had ever heard of him.
Nobody ever wanted to talk about him because he wrote horror and horror is not cool.
It's not literary.
And then, of course, Carrie came out and he exploded.
What that tells me about King, though, there's so many guys on the bestseller list, and I don't want to mention them, but who have no talent whatsoever.
So many guys who are some of the most popular authors in America who are just terrible.
But King is not one of them.
And if I had to place money on what would still be, would King still be read, say, 100 years from now, I would say that probably his novels will go out of date.
Probably, you know, most novels go out of fashion after a while.
And it wouldn't surprise me if his did too.
But his short stories, and I've made this point before, that the best ghost stories are short stories.
Some of his short stories, I think, are going to be read forever, just like Edgar Allan Poe's.
I think he's that good.
And his best is the story Children of the Corn.
And anybody who's seen the movie knows it's just awful.
It's just these awful, awful movies.
That story is one of the most frightening stories I've ever read.
I would love it if people try it.
Get back to me.
If that's not the scariest thing that Stephen King has ever done, I'll take it back and say something else.
But I think that short story, Children of the Corn, is the best.
That is Halloween stuff I like.
I'm done.
I will be back again tomorrow.
This is Andrew Clavin with the Andrew Clavin Show.