Andrew Clavin skewers modern politics with a satirical recap of Biden’s withdrawal, Clinton’s mocking Obama, and Trump’s "space tower" boast while dissecting Paul Ryan’s principled conservatism vs. leftist resistance, then pivots to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, exposing its Reagan-era ties and anti-Semitic baggage. He slams formulaic storytelling—from Star Wars to progressive narratives—as a genie-like distortion of human complexity, warning that rigid frameworks (political or fictional) fail to grasp reality’s chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time for the political news roundup from the Daily Wire.
Vice President Joe Biden has announced he will not seek the Democrat nomination for president.
Frontrunner Hillary Clinton reacted to the news at a press conference saying, quote, it's over.
All my enemies lie dead at my feet.
The presidency is mine, mine, mine.
Feel my power.
It is greater than Zod.
I am the mother of dragons, and the whole world trembles at my lightest whim.
After the coronation, America will know what it is to fear me.
That other president, what's his name?
The skinny black man, his executive orders will be as puny nothings next to those that issue from my holy mouth now that the presidency is finally mine, Unquote.
Candidate Bernie Sanders said he also welcomed the vice president's decision.
On the Republican side, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan said he would serve as Speaker of the House if the warring Republican factions would unite behind him.
He also said he would sing the love area from Carmen if a magic fairy came from Wonderland and made him a soprano.
The staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus sent mixed signals about the Ryan bid.
On the one hand, they agreed to support Ryan, but on the other, they descended on his village in a thunder of horses' hooves, burned his huts, put the men to the sword, and exulted in the lamentation of his women.
You wanted unity, said one caucus member.
We will show you a unity of flames and darkness that will lay the whole world waste.
Ryan thanked the caucus for their support and begged for mercy for the children.
Meanwhile, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump released a new policy paper promising to restore the nation's space program by building a tower to the sun.
My tower will be huge, he said.
It will be so huge that God himself will not be able to knock me from the mighty hugeness of it.
That's how huge my huge tower will be.
In answer to the announcement, Trump's poll numbers rose 15%.
Jeb Bush, who spent a fortune on ads in New Hampshire, celebrated a rise in his poll numbers from 11% to 10%.
When told that was actually not a rise, but a decline, Governor Bush responded, quote, damn it, I was afraid of that.
In international news, Canada elected a smoking hot new prime minister with abs to die for.
The election of the liberal Justin Trudeau put an end to nearly nine years of conservative leadership.
In exit polls, voters said they were tired of a stable economy and sanity in government.
It was so boring it was almost like living in Canada.
Back in America, voters readied themselves for an election that would pit a megalomaniac congenital liar against a shabby, boorish, and dishonest shyster with no one sure which one was which.
In meadows and dells across the land, a desperate cry has arisen, trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Well, if anybody has any doubt in their mind that the fight for the Democrat nomination is over, I just want you to take a look at Hillary's opponent, Martin O'Malley, former Maryland governor on The View.
I think this was yesterday.
Could you play this clip?
Because baby, now we got bad blood.
You know it used to be bad blood.
So take a look at what you've done.
That baby now we got bad blood.
Now we got blood, now we got blood, and now we can't solve it.
You made a really deep heart, and baby, now we got bad blood.
So does that look to anybody like somebody who has hopes of holding high elected office?
It used to be.
You know, I remember Clinton went on Arsinio, I think, and played the Saks, but Clinton could actually play the Saks.
That was kind of a different thing.
Anyway, yesterday I was talking about the things about politics that make me, that drive me a little crazy.
I mean, I believe in politics.
I believe we have, you know, Charles Krauthammer said all the good things in life go away if you don't get the politics right.
All true.
But I think the thing that bothers me most about politics is the fact that people lose their reason.
It's a question of, it's the problem with engaging with politics in our minds in the realm of theory and then applying our theories to actual messy, crazy life.
Like yesterday I was listening to people talk about Paul Ryan and there were people saying, oh, Paul Ryan, he's not a conservative.
I mean, on what planet is Paul Ryan not a conservative?
You don't have to agree with him.
You don't have to like him.
You don't have to think he should be the Speaker of the House.
But the guy is a conservative.
I mean, is he not?
He's a conservative.
You know, people say, well, it's his immigration stance.
I don't like his immigration stance.
Immigration stances are easy.
I mean, it doesn't mean you're wrong, but they're easy.
Nobody likes immigrants.
Nobody likes immigrants.
I mean, when Hillary Clinton goes out and says, oh, the DREAMers, I love the Dreamers, that's because the only Dreamer she ever sees is the guy who is mowing one of the lawns on her $750 gazillion dollar estates.
Oh, look, a dreamer.
I love that guy.
You know, that's what she means.
The rest of us, you know, they don't talk like us.
They don't look like us.
They act funny.
Until we beat them into assimilation, they cause a lot of trouble.
And so it's easy to pound your fist and be against immigration.
Like I said, it's not wrong.
This is illegal immigration.
So there's every reason to be against it.
But Paul Ryan was for entitlement reform.
That's the third rail of politics.
I mean, he is the guy in the arena.
We're not in the arena.
He is in the arena, and he shifted the entire Congress to support what used to be untouchable.
I mean, you should hear, when I talk to liberals about Paul Ryan, it is like, talk about a stuck pig.
The idea that you might touch the stuff that is bankrupting our country for leftism, for the sake of leftism, that takes guts.
And so don't support him, do support him, but the guy is a conservative, definitely.
And the other one, I got to say, is Trump.
I mean, I've come to terms with the VAC that Trump is a phenomenon.
And I've been looking at the Breitbart site, and the Breitbart sites have plunked for Trump.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
They are commentary sites.
It's not like ABC, CBS, and NBC have plunked for Obama and Hillary and the Democrats.
They're corrupt and dishonest because they're using the public airwaves to theoretically give us the news.
And they're really just selling us Democrat propaganda.
But there's nothing wrong with Breitbart plunking for Trump.
Their traffic has gone up, I think it's 75%, they said, just after they started this.
They're getting, you know, like 5,000 comments on each post.
Hannity is doing it.
Hannity, again, he has the right to plunk for everybody he wants.
I got to say, I don't hate Trump.
I just don't get it.
To me, he is the Obama of the right.
I mean, when Obama came out, I oppose leftism completely because I believe it's slavery.
But I don't totally oppose the liberal impulse, the idea that we have to watch out for the poor and the idea that we shouldn't let our patriotism shade into jingoism, that we should remain culturally critical.
You know, those impulses are right.
I think those impulses belong on the right as well as the left.
When I saw Obama, I thought, this guy is the hollow shell of those impulses.
He has a picture of himself that says hope on it.
I mean, to me, that's like one of those televangelists who says, put your hand on the television screen and I'll heal you, and then send me your money.
I mean, when somebody says to me, I'm going to give you hope, I immediately, I just think on general principles before I even look into them, I think the guy's a fraud.
It's like when somebody comes to me and says, you know, if you don't let me control the energy supply in this nation, the world will end because of global cooling, warming, change, climate, something.
I just grab my wallet.
That's what I do.
And so when somebody says hope, and to me, Trump is the same thing.
He expresses the anger on the right, and the anger on the right is justified, but remember, like anger is the devil's cocaine.
Anger feels like virtue, and it feels like principle, and it feels like righteousness, but it's just anger.
Even when it's justified, it's still just anger.
So he expresses the anger.
But is he dedicated to the Constitution?
Is he dedicated to my freedom?
Is he going to take the talons of the government out of my pocket?
He keeps saying, I'm going to make America great again.
Just leave me alone.
I'll make America great again.
You'll make America great again.
I just don't get it.
So, you know, that is where I am at this point.
I'm still watching.
I think Trump actually has a chance at the presidency.
If I had said that, you know, a month ago, I just, you know, my teeth would have just fallen out.
I can't be in this mouth that is speaking those words.
Star Wars and Campbell's Mythology00:12:42
They just would have left.
Anyway, the theme of today's show is theory and reality, is imposing theory on reality.
Because yesterday we were talking to Jeremy, Jeremy Boring, the editor of the Daily Wire and our producer, about Star Wars.
And it was such a good conversation that somebody tweeted me this morning that when he saw me talking to Jeremy, he was jealous because he realized that everybody he worked with was an idiot.
And that's true.
I mean, one of the reasons I love coming in here is I love talking to people.
I could easily not do any work at all.
But we were talking about Star Wars, and the guy who inspired George Lucas on Star Wars was a guy named Joseph Campbell.
And Joseph Campbell was a mythographer.
He collected all the mythology of the world and wrote encyclopedias on mythology.
And this is an interesting story because it has to do with the time when the left was moving to take over our culture.
I discovered Joseph Campbell, I don't know, somewhere in the 80s, you know, a long time ago, a long time, but nobody knew who he was.
Absolutely obscure college professor.
I think he was working out of Hawaii or something.
And he was writing these books about mythology.
And I loved mythology.
And I was always reading.
I had read Ovid's Metamorphosis a million times.
I just loved Greek and Roman mythology.
And one day I was sitting on a train, and I picked up his book that I had bought.
I had an old ratty copy that I had found in a store and just looked kind of interesting.
And it was called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
And nobody had ever heard of this book.
I found it in a used bookstore.
It was just this tattered book.
And I started reading it.
And for one of, I think maybe three times in my life, I had to put the book down and cover my face with my hands because the ideas were like exploding in my head.
It was just such an amazing idea.
His basic idea was that all myths are one myth, or all of a certain kind of myth are one myth.
He would call it the mono-myth, and now we call it the hero's journey.
And that was what the hero with a thousand faces was about.
It was about the hero's journey.
And he described it just very briefly.
He said, a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder.
Fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won.
The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
And he explained why this was important to us.
Obviously, you can see the minute you hear that that that describes almost every hero myth in the world, in all of world literature.
And he talked about why this mattered to us.
And I have a clip I found of him because now he's very famous.
I had a clip I found of him where he talks about why mythology matters to us.
Can we play that, Matt?
Well, the ego can't reflect upon itself unless it has a mirror against which to read itself.
And that mirror would be the mythological schedule that lets it know where it is.
It's a mirror with a schedule in it.
A patterned mirror.
And the ego sees itself in that reflex and knows where it is on the scoreboard.
Just for example, a person who at the age of 40 is wondering whether he's going to be punished by mother hasn't moved on.
And a person at the age of 80 who's wondering, how's my God scar, he hasn't moved on either.
And I mean, just in a raw, gross way, this is the paramount.
Myth lets you know where you are.
And it knows what the patterns have been of life through centuries in that position that you now are entering or holding.
So, in other words, he's saying that we see our development in the story of the hero, and if we're falling behind that, we know it, and it kind of brings us up to date.
And so George Lucas brought this guy in to talk to him when he was making Star Wars, because he wanted to model Star Wars on the myths, on this mono-myth that Campbell was talking about.
When Campbell died, I then went from reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I literally read every book this guy ever wrote, and he wrote encyclopedias.
So I was reading encyclopedias of myth, you know, just because I couldn't get enough of him.
And when he died, which was 85, 86, something like that, I was working for The Village Voice, which was the flagship left-wing newspaper in New York.
I was writing book reviews and things.
And I called them up and I said, do you want an obit on Joseph Campbell?
And they said, who's Joseph Campbell?
We never heard of him.
And I said, well, well, he was this big important myth guy, and he affected Star Wars.
Nobody knows who he is.
Almost immediately after this, very shortly after he died, Bill Moyers on PBS did a series of interviews with him, which just became immense.
I mean, it was one of the most popular shows PBS ever did.
And he became this kind of mystic guru to people because they heard about mythology and all this.
And he had this line where his big advice was follow your bliss.
And that didn't mean, you know, he was attacked for that later on as it's being selfish, but he didn't mean that.
He meant, you know, your bliss informs you of what you're meant to do.
And you should follow it even when the world tries to stop you and follow it even when it goes against the grain.
And that's how you will find what you're meant to do.
And so he became this kind of mystic.
There's still, up in Santa Barbara, where I used to live, there's a college called Pacifica.
And it's this airy fairy college where they teach Jungian psychology.
All this stuff is based on the psychology of Carl Jung, who was a colleague of Freud's, but he took all this into the mythological realm.
So they teach Jungian psychology, and I believe they have some of Campbell's papers, and Joseph Campbell governed specifically.
So he became this idol to people.
And one of the things he talked about with Moyers is Star Wars.
He actually looked with Moyers at Star Wars.
Play that.
We'll just play a little bit of that.
Does a movie like Star Wars fill some of that need for the spiritual adventure for the hero?
Oh, it's perfect.
It does the cycle perfectly.
It's not simple morality play.
It has to do with the powers of life and their inflection through the action of man.
One of the wonderful things I think about this adventure into space is that the narrator, the artist, the one thinking up the story, is in a field that is not covered by our own knowledges.
Do you, when you look at something like Star Wars, recognize some of the themes of the hero throughout mythology?
Well, I think that George Lucas was using standard mythological figures.
Now we all know this stuff, you know, but then it was absolutely electric and it took the intellectual left by storm and they started to love him.
And so now the Village Voice called me back and said, you know, you were going to write about Joseph Campbell.
Now we'd like you to, now we know who he is, we'd like you to write about.
So I had read every word this guy had written, and I sat down to write what was my kind of magnum opus on Joseph Campbell.
I wrote this really long piece, and I handed it in to this left-wing paper.
And they called me up.
The editor called me up, lovely woman, but really far to the left.
I mean, I was the Genghis, even then, I was the Attila the Hun of the Village Voice, and I was still a lefty then.
And she called me up and she said, is this guy Campbell some kind of conservative?
And I had no idea.
What did I care what his politics were?
I was reading about mythology.
I had no idea.
And I said, you know, I just don't know.
I don't know the answer to that.
And she said, okay, because some of this stuff is very suspicious to me, very suspicious.
So I said, I really, I don't know any way, and I don't even know how to find out about his politics.
So a couple of weeks after this, after my piece comes out, the New York Review of Books, which was also a big left-wing journal, but on a very high intellectual plane, it was really the kind of intellectual left journal of the left, brings out this attack piece on Campbell written by Brendan Gill, who was a very famous writer and editor for The New Yorker.
He was one of the kind of standard intellectual go-to guys of that era.
And he wrote a piece just disassembling Campbell, saying that he knew Campbell personally, they were good friends, but Campbell was an anti-Semite.
And he remembered how they'd been standing in a bar and Campbell had made this remark and that remark.
This became a huge controversy because people started writing letters back and forth and people who knew Campbell were defending them.
But many were saying, yes, he did have some prejudice views and all this stuff.
And Gill took this idea, you know, that, oh, well, he had to do this.
He had this kind of warrior, that faux warrior attitude that left-wingers have, you know, when they're attacking somebody who can't fight back.
Because after all, he waited till the guy was dead before he said anything about him.
And then he said, well, you know, as long as he wasn't popular, I was ready to let him rest in peace.
But as soon as the Bill Moyers thing came out and made him famous, I felt I had to wage war against him.
I love the rhetoric.
That was the rhetoric he used.
And it's very left-wing rhetoric when you're waging war against a guy who's dead and can't actually fight back.
You're waging war where there's no other side.
But I personally was really rocked by this because like most decent writers, I'm a perfectionist.
I expect to get as much right as possible.
I get very upset when I get even a little fact wrong.
And now I felt, did I miss something?
Did I not read something in Campbell's work?
Was there something that I went back over his work and I did find incidences of prejudice and things like this.
And I actually didn't write another non-fiction piece for several years.
It was years, because this has been a major piece for me.
It was years before I went back and wrote another non-fiction piece before I got my confidence back because I thought I had missed something terrible.
It was only as I started to shift over to the right and started to see the left for what it was.
The left was the water I swam in, so I didn't even know it was there.
It was only when I began to see that it was there that I realized that this was an assassination.
Because of course, my editor at the Village Voice was right.
Campbell was a conservative.
He was a rock-ribbed Reagan conservative who thought the kids in the 60s were babies who hadn't grown up, who hadn't reached the stages that myth is supposed to take us through.
And he just, and he did partake of some of that old-fashioned pre-Buckley anti-Semitism and bigotry that went with the right before Buckley kind of cleared out the house.
And so he did have that in his personal life, but not really in his writings.
And what difference did it make?
What difference did it make?
It was an assassination.
They hated him because he was a right-winger.
And now what they've done is they've written that out of his life.
If you go to Pacifica, I have a friend, and I can't mention his name because he's a big Hollywood player, and he's a right-winger, and he doesn't want to come out because it would hurt his career.
But he got, I think, a PhD at Pacifica, and he said he loved nothing better than to go there.
They're all left-wingers, all with this follow-your bliss, airy fairy nonsense that misinterpreted what Campbell said.
And he used to love to go there and tell them, oh, but you know, he was a conservative, you know.
And this was part of, this was the Reagan era, and it was part of the left realizing that they had lost the political battle, that for all the 60s, all they did in the 60s, they had lost the political battle, and so they were going into the culture, and they were assassinating any cultural, you know, not figuratively assassinating, any cultural figure who wasn't towing the party line.
We talked about before how they did this to Saul Bellow, our Nobel Prize-winning novelist, one of the greatest novelists of all time, when he made a remark about the Zulus not having a book as good as War and Peace because their culture wasn't as good, they assassinated him.
They wiped him out of the canon of American literature.
They were doing the same thing to Campbell, and now what they've done with Campbell is because they know he's right, they know his work on mythology is right, is they've just written his conservatism out of it.
But his conservatism, his political conservatism is a very important part of what he did.
Anyway, he became this big dude, Star Wars became this big thing, and Star Wars became such a huge hit that Campbellian thought became codified into theory, which is what we were talking about before, imposing theory on reality.
Joke About Writers And Fiction00:03:44
So now, when you go, this is absolutely true, when you go into an office in Hollywood and start to pitch a story, you'll bump into all these executives who have read Joseph Campbell and think that you have to hit the hero myth beat by beat by beat.
And there's one very, very famous director, and I think he's made some great movies.
You go in and on his wall, he has a chart of the hero's journey, a little cycle that goes through.
Now, let me tell you my reaction to this.
My reaction, I wrote a piece called No Joke for City Journal.
And it starts with a joke.
I will tell you this joke.
This joke was told to me maybe 10 years ago by my brother-in-law at a family barbecue.
When he told me this joke, I laughed without exaggeration, off and on, for a week.
First of all, I was crippled with laughter when he told it to me.
I would wake up day after day, remember the joke, and start laughing again.
I'm not building it up too much because I can tell you what happened then, what anybody does when he hears a joke.
I told it to everybody I knew, everybody I met, people I remembered from the old day.
I just called people up and told them this joke, and I discovered no one else thought it was funny, which isn't, that isn't quite true.
Once every 10 or 15 people, I would hit somebody who'd have the same reaction as me.
I remember calling one of my brothers who was a writer and telling it to him, and there was a pause on the other end of the line, and then he exploded with laughter.
And I started to think, well, what is this?
You know what?
I mean, I think this is, I thought it was literally the funniest joke I ever heard, but clearly nobody else thinks it's funny.
So don't worry if I tell it and you don't laugh.
I mean, nobody else.
But then I began to realize when I added up the people who laughed that they were all writers of fiction.
Every single one of them was either a movie screenwriter or a novelist like me.
And they all were writers of fiction.
And writers of fiction found this joke hilarious.
So here's the joke.
You don't have to laugh, but I'll just tell it.
Guy walks into a bar, okay, and he has an orange for a head.
Instead of a head, he has an orange.
The bartender makes him a drink, puts the drink down in front of him, and says, so, buddy, you want to tell me about it?
The guy with an orange for a head says, well, you know, I was walking along the beach and I stumbled on something and I picked it up, and it turned out to be an old antique brass lantern.
And so I took it home and I started to polish it and a puff of smoke came out and suddenly a genie was standing before me.
And he said, Master, you have freed me from the lamp.
I'm going to grant you three wishes.
So the guy with the orange for the head goes on.
He says, well, I thought it was a joke.
I thought it was a joke.
So I said offhand, Leo, well, I'd like $10 million.
Doorbell rings.
I go downstairs.
I open the door.
There's a guy from one of these mail-order sweepstakes.
He says, congratulations, you've won $10 million.
He said, now I realize this is serious.
So I go back to the genie and I make a second wish.
He says, I'd like to sleep.
I'd like to have an orgy with every hot supermodel in New York.
Doorbell rings again.
Door comes open.
All these beautiful, beautiful girls come in.
It's time to party.
They have a tremendous orgy.
They leave.
He goes back to the genie.
He says, so I went back to the genie for my third wish.
And this is where I think I may have made a mistake.
And the bartender says, why?
What did you do?
He said, well, I wish to have an orange for a head.
You can hear the wild laughter around me.
I said, why do I find this joke so funny?
And why do writers of fiction find this joke so funny?
Here's what I wrote for City Journal about this joke.
Why do story writers almost exclusively find this joke hilarious?
I believe the answer is that for those of us who have worked hard to master the storyteller's craft, the joke both dramatizes and exemplifies the most painful and ridiculous truth we've learned.
Why This Joke Is Funny00:02:25
No narrative structure is big enough to contain the infinite perversity of the human heart.
Anyone who has written for the movies has encountered producers or studio execs who have read Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces or Robert McKee's story or Christopher Booker's seven basic plots or something like that.
And equipped with these guides, they now think they know how the writer's job is done.
And they'll interrupt your pitch to ask questions like, where does the hero confront the other, speaking with a gravity that seems to imply against all the evidence that they are talking something other than blithering nonsense.
It's not that there's no wisdom in these guides.
They can be vaguely helpful.
But continually to construct your stories according to their universal frameworks is ultimately to guarantee creations that are blandly commercial at best and empty, cynical, and stale at worst, because none of their templates will ever produce the orange head joke.
Not one can encompass our perversity.
Now here's the point of everything I've been saying.
All right, I'm going to read it from this from City Journal because I thought I wrote it as well as I'm going to say it.
As it is with fiction, so it is with the narratives of life that it imitates, with politics and with history.
Consider that study after study shows that faith, self-reliance, and chastity make human beings happier and healthier.
Yet not only do we abandon these behaviors individually out of personal folly and weakness, we dismantle them as a society by intention and design, preaching and modeling lifestyles to our young that are almost guaranteed to make them sad and sick and dependent.
Consider that the earth has poured millions of years worth of energy into the fossils of its dead creatures, presenting us with the Promethean gift of fuels that elevate us beyond the imaginations of our ancestors.
And our response is we nurture a superstitious dread of oil and coal.
Or consider finally that we were born into the freest, strongest, and wealthiest nation that mankind has ever known and elected as our president a man who promised to fundamentally transform it.
Yes, I think that may be where we made our mistake.
We wish to have an orange for a head.
You cannot contain human life in theory.
And when we take the theories of our politics and apply it to human beings, they're not going to fit.
They're not going to fit.
And so these guys who are sent like I, like Obama and like Trump, who are essentially selling us a mythology.
They're essentially selling us a mythology.
They're lying to us on the face of it, even before you start reading it.
Essentially Selling Mythology00:02:12
All right, that's enough.
That's enough.
That's all I have to say.
Except for stuff I like.
We have to go out with traveling music.
It's the end of our week.
We'll be back on Monday.
This is a singer that I'm crazy about who has made absolutely no headway in America.
There's an old movie, 1992, called Singles, about singles in Seattle.
And it's one of Cameron Crowe's early movies.
He's the guy who did Jerry Maguire, one of my favorite films.
And it's a cute little movie.
It has Bridget Fonda and Matt Dillon.
And Matt Dillon plays a guy with a garage band who has put out a record that has sold well in Belgium.
And he keeps saying throughout the thing, we're doing really well in Europe.
You know, we're doing well in Europe.
Well, this is Caro Emerald, who is doing spectacularly in the Netherlands.
Her records have outsold things like Thriller in the Netherlands.
Her concert tours are absolutely sold out, but nobody knows about her.
She is this kind of, her music is this weird retro jazz with a lot of kind of sampling behind it, you know, where they use other people's sounds and kind of filter them in.
I'm crazy about her.
Her first album was called Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor.
It came out, I think, in 2005.
And it's got a million good songs.
It's really good.
I also find her incredibly sexy.
Every time I say that, somebody says, well, she's overweight.
And she is, she's overweight.
But I find her incredibly sexy.
So we will end this week with Caro Emerald singing what I think is still her best song called Back It Up.