Andrew Clavin retools Noel Coward’s 1930s anti-appeasement satire to mock modern "trigger warnings" about Muslims, framing Trump’s mosque closures and deportations as pragmatic post-Paris counterterrorism. He blames Obama’s Iraq withdrawal for ISIS’s rise, dismissing NYT claims of U.S. safety while speculating Obama’s narcissism fuels his denial. Madonna’s "kindness over violence" plea and Missouri’s "safe spaces" become symbols of detached idealism, while Clavin pits Nietzsche’s moral nihilism against Dostoevsky’s Judeo-Christian order—arguing Western decline stems from rejecting objective truth. Islamic rejection of Christ’s divinity, he claims, clashes with Locke-Jefferson natural law, justifying stricter immigration vetting; the episode ends celebrating France’s culture despite its political flaws, invoking Aznavour’s Paris in August. [Automatically generated summary]
Let us treat them very kindly, as we would have valued friends.
We might send them out some bishops as a form of lease and land.
Let's be sweet to them and day by day repeat to them that sterilization simply isn't done.
Let's sweetly sympathize again and help the scum to rise again, but don't let's be beastly to the hun.
We must be kind and with an open mind.
We must endeavor to find a way to let the Germans know that now the war is over, they are not the ones who have to pay.
We must be sweet and tactful and discreet.
And now they've suffered defeat, we mustn't let them feel upset or ever get the feeling that we're cross with them or hate them.
Our future policy must be to reinstate them.
Don't let's be beastly to the Germans.
For they're civilized when all is said and done.
Though they gave us science, culture, art, and music to excess, they also gave us two world wars and Dr. Rudolf Hess.
Let's be meek to them and turn the other cheek to them.
Try to arouse their latent sense of fun.
Let's give them full air parody and treat the rats with charity.
But don't let's bibistle the hun.
Don't let's bibistle the Germans.
You can't deprive a gangster of his gun.
Though they've been a little naughty to the Czechs and Poles and Dutch, I can't believe those countries really mind it very much.
Let's be free with them and share the BBC with them.
We mustn't prevent them basking in the sun.
Let's soften their defeat again and build their bloody fleet again.
But don't let's bibistry the hunt.
That was the incomparable Noel Coward singing Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans.
And by Germans, I mean Muslims.
And by don't let's be beastly I mean trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
That song was written during the war by Noel Coward.
He was, you know, he was, if you don't know who Noel Coward was, he was the great genius of light comedy and musicals on the British stage before the war.
And then during the war, he started to write these very patriotic songs, his most famous being London Pride, Blitz by Blitz, our resistance toughening from the writs to the anchor and crown.
Great stuff.
But this song he wrote and apparently played it at a party and Winston Churchill loved it so much, he called for three encores.
And then they played it on the BBC and people took it seriously, thought he was telling people to be nice to the Germans.
And they went insane and they had to ban the song from the BBC.
But obviously just a great, you know, parody of the people who were saying, let's be nice to the Germans as we were after World War I so they could build their fleet again.
And as he says, blow us all to hell again, don't let's be beastly to the hunt.
Which brings us to the events of the weekend.
I wanted to talk about Trainwreck, the movie, and sacks.
I mean, I was all ready to talk about sacks and movies and stuff like that.
And then they start killing people in Paris, which I just found untoward.
And we do have to talk about this because obviously a great tragedy and a new stage in the war.
And it, of course, interrupted all of our enjoyment of the Democrat debate, which I'm sure you all had your DVRs on, right, for the Democrat debate, so you could not only watch it but re-watch it and memorize the finer points at the water cooler.
This is pitiful.
I mean, it's pitiful.
Containment Strategy00:07:15
We have these desiccated old crones, these corrupt old socialists debating on which decade of the 19th century will they want to drag us back into.
And we're going to lose to them because we're screwing around with Donald Trump.
You know, Donald Trump kicks an old lady to death and his poll numbers go up like 20%.
Well, at least he's not like the GOP establishment letting these old ladies run around loose.
He just kicks them right to death.
I love that about Trump.
This is the best.
And now he's talking, he's going to close the mosques.
He's going, if he's elected, he'd hate to do it.
He'd hate to do it.
But that little thing in the Constitution about freedom to exercise your religion, this is going to be the Trump constant.
This is going to be the Trump stitch.
The Trump stitch is going to be in place.
And people just buy into this stuff.
He may be the only candidate who's going to lose to these people that they've got up there.
They're begging us to beat them.
It's like all they, they really should, their debates should just be they should just come and say, please, please take the power out of our hands before we destroy more of your country.
But we just can't bring ourselves to do it.
We can't, you know, Rubio, he could beat them.
I think he could beat Hillary Clinton easily, but no, no, no, no.
He just won't, he doesn't kick old ladies to death the way Trump does.
That's what I want to see.
I want to see that closing the mosques and building walls and a deportation force.
We're all out there.
It's all going to happen in a Trump, in a Trump America, the United States of Trump.
Sad, sad, sad.
All right.
But let's take one look.
We've got to take one look at the debate, a moment from the debate, because they were forced to talk about what they never want to talk about, is terrorism, which under the Obama and Clinton administration, because remember, let's remember she was the Secretary of State, the Middle East has caught fire.
The fire was out by the time Obama took office.
Joe Biden was saying, boy, our victory in Iraq is going to be one of the great achievements of the Obama administration.
Remember Joe Biden saying that?
And then Obama pulled all the troops out and the place caught fire.
And he's made one mistake after another.
Syria, Libya, everything he's touched has turned to dung and the place has just gone nuts.
And now that violence, of course, of course, is overrunning into the West.
So let's hear what Hillary Clinton says we're going to do about it.
This is her plan as commander-in-chief.
Cannot be an American fight.
And I think what the president has consistently said, which I agree with, is that we will support those who take the fight to ISIS.
That is why we have troops in Iraq that are helping to train and build back up the Iraqi military, why we have special operators in Syria working with the Kurds and Arabs so that we can be supportive.
But this cannot be an American fight, although American leadership is essential.
Yeah, we're going to lead from behind.
We're going to continue to lead from behind.
We can't mess.
You want to hear the scariest article I've read about this?
This is in this morning's New York Times op-ed page by Stephen Simon and Daniel Benjamin.
One of them had been in the State Department.
Now they're both at Dartmouth teaching foreign affairs.
And they say we don't have to worry about what happened in Paris.
The slaughter in France, he says it's the United States is a significantly safer place.
While vigilance remains essential, no one should panic.
Don't panic.
It's not our fight.
The slaughter in France depended on four things, okay?
Easy access to Paris.
Now, we don't have that in New York.
Nobody can get into New York.
I mean, the place is like a walled city, LA.
How on earth would a jihadi ever get into LA, except the freeways or just walking in?
So now the other thing they have, say these guys that we don't have to worry about, is European citizens happy to massacre their compatriots.
We don't have that.
We don't have any American citizens happy to massacre their compatriots because we're such a great place.
Only 51% of the Muslims in America want Sharia law.
So it's only 51%.
So we're safe.
Just breathe a sigh of relief.
Because I was worried there for a minute, okay?
What else?
That's one thing.
Oh, and a Euro-jihadist infrastructure to supply weapons and security agencies that lacked resources to monitor the individuals involved.
Man, we know everybody coming across our borders.
We have that thing.
It's just, on our border, there's just a little doorway, and one guy has to come through at a time.
And we watch, we count them off.
You know, it's like Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, fine, jihadi, out.
You know, that's how it works.
Our border is so secure.
We have nothing to worry about.
And what else?
These are the problems the United States does not have, at least not nearly to the degree that Europe does.
Well, yeah, not nearly to the degree that Europe does yet.
So this is like the illusion we're living in, the illusion that Hillary Clinton wants us to continue living in.
This is what she agreed with Obama.
Well, let's see Obama's take on the situation.
This is nine hours before these madmen opened fire and wiped out over 100 Frenchmen at the theater and restaurants just sitting around.
These guys opened fire and killed them in absolute cold blood.
This is Obama nine hours before talking to Democrat Shill George Stephanopoulos, all right.
Well, I don't think they're gaining strength.
What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.
They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria, they'll come in, they'll leave, but you don't see this systematic march by ISIL across the terrain.
What we have not yet been able to do is to completely decapitate their command and control structures.
We've made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters, and part of our goal has to be to recruit more effective Sunni partners in Iraq to really go on offense rather than simply engage in defense.
Right, we're going to go on offense through them, not us.
We're not going to go.
So, once again, they are contained.
They are contained.
They're just contained to the Middle East and Europe and Michigan.
So they're not spreading over the entire world as we know they are.
I mean, these refugees are pouring into Europe, so that's their containment.
I mean, this is all a part of the way Obama has been talking since he's been president.
The tide of war is receding.
ISIS is the JV team.
After Charlie Hebdo, remember they're random folks killing random folks.
They walked into a Jewish deli and started killing, massacring Jews.
It's just random people.
And every time there's an attack over here, it's a lone wolf.
It's a random lone wolf.
Even when he says ISIL, if you notice, he always uses the term ISIL because ISIL is in the Levant, I think.
It's right, ISIS in the Levant.
He doesn't want to say ISIS, which means in Syria, because he doesn't want to admit that he has let the situation in Syria deteriorate to the point where they have established a presence there.
He says they're going in and out of Syria.
You know, like they're going in and out of Europe, too, and in and out of America, too.
Moral Order Reality00:15:43
So, I mean, it's like, it's all denial.
You know, I really dislike it when people take people they disagree with and attribute psychological motives to what they're saying.
I mean, I'm as guilty of this as anybody else, where you'll say, oh, those liberals, you know, they just want to feel good about themselves.
They just want to feel virtuous.
Whereas conservatives, we're fact-based.
We want virtuous results.
It's a little too self-flattering for me.
I always get suspicious of myself when I hear those words come out of my mouth, though I do hear it.
However, Obama's behavior has been for the last seven years so wrong, so wrongheaded, so irrational, that you start to wonder what is going on in the guy's mind.
I mean, I know there are people who think, oh, he's a Muslim super spy.
He's a sleeper agent.
He's been sent here to destroy us.
You know, I just don't believe that there's, I frankly don't believe that anyone is as brilliant to do purposely what Obama has done out of stupidity, you know.
But I do believe that Obama has a psychological illness, a disorder.
I think he has narcissistic personality disorder.
And when I say that, I don't just mean that as an insult, though he uses the word I, I, I all the time, though he does.
Narcissistic personality disorder is an actual thing.
It's a personality disorder.
See if I have, I think I brought a description of it.
It's probably from the DSM, which is the diagnostic book that psychiatrists use.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others.
But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem steam that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism.
That does sound familiar to me.
I know a lot about narcissism because I work in the arts.
Narcissism is an occupational hazard of the arts.
When you meet an artist who is not a narcissist, it's such a relief that you can hardly believe he's got any talent because it seems that the narcissism comes with the talent.
But that's not true.
It's just an occupational hazard because you spend so much time in your own head, you spend so much time reviewing your own life and using the materials of your life to build stories and tell stories that you begin to confuse your imagination with the world.
And that's what narcissism really is.
It's confusing your imagination with the world.
Let's take a look at Madonna, a classic narcissist.
I mean, a classic person who thinks that the world is going on inside her own head and that she has an effect on the world through her behavior.
She gave a concert in Stockholm, I think, after this disaster in Paris.
And this is what she told the crowd, how we're going to prevent further attacks from ISIS.
But we will never, ever, ever change this world that we live in if we do not change ourselves.
If we do not change the way we treat one another on a daily basis.
Yes.
The way we change the world is not to elect another president, not to kill 100 more people.
The way we change the world is that we change the way we treat one another on a daily basis in the simplest ways.
Okay?
We must start treating every human being with dignity and respect.
And this is the only thing that will change the world.
I was with her until she ruled out killing 100 more people.
I can think of 100 people right off the top of my head.
I think the world would improve the world if we wiped them out.
You know, that's a classic expression of narcissism.
If we start treating people differently, they will become other than they are.
It deprives them of their own agency.
It deprives them of their own philosophy.
Most of us have dealt with this, usually with our parents or with our children, because it's very hard for parents to separate from their children.
It's very hard for them to realize that their little baby who is so dependent on them has grown up.
And so one day the child says, I don't want to do what you want me to do.
I want to do what I want to do.
And a parent often will say, well, you're just doing that to hurt me.
Without thinking that maybe the child actually wants to do, has his own agency, wants to do something else.
And that's kind of the journey of being a parent is letting go.
That's how you know you're not a narcissist.
And a narcissist can never let go.
So that's Madonna telling us that the world is actually taking place inside her head.
If we just be nice to people, they'll suddenly lose their philosophy.
They'll suddenly give up their traditions.
They'll suddenly give up their belief systems.
Nowhere was this more evident than at the University of Missouri where the, remember the Black Lives Matter people have gone nuts because there was one or two incidents that offended them and they're demanding safe spaces and they're, oh, it's terrible.
They forced the president to resign.
The chancellor had to resign, all because of these, they feel bad.
They feel bad in their heads.
They were upset at the massacre in Paris because it took them off the news.
So Milo Yiannopoulos, who's now become like the indispensable man over at the Breitbart sites, collected some of their, collected some of their tweets and their tweeted reactions.
Racist white people, kill me.
You want everyone to have sympathy for your tragedy, but you have none for ours.
I mean, one person may have been called the N-word at Mizzou.
Somebody put a swastika in human feces on a wall, which I'm not even sure was an anti-black statement.
And that's comparable to these people being machine gunned because what happens in their imagination is the same as what's happening in real life.
Interesting how the news reports are covering the Paris terrorist attacks, but said nothing about the terrorist attack at Mizzou.
because it didn't exist where there was no reason not to cover it.
I mean, this is...
Let's have a test.
Let's...
Let's use our imaginations.
Let's go to imagination land for a minute, all right?
Let's say you're Captain Kirk.
You're going someplace that no one's ever gone before, and you land on the planet Hitler, all right?
You land on the planet Hitler, where everybody is a Nazi.
Everybody believes in torturing the weak, in killing people for racist reasons.
Maybe it's the planet slavery, the planet Confederacy, where everybody believes that black people can be held slaves, and that's fine.
And even black people, they've never seen anything different, so they don't like being held slaves, but they have no idea that that's not supposed to happen.
Is it right?
Is it right on that planet?
Is it right on the planet that black people be held slaves?
How many people have to land on that planet who don't think it's right before it stops being right?
Are you, is it just you?
I mean, you're outvoted by everybody else on the planet.
If you think that it's right on that planet because everybody believes in it, then you understand what people like Obama and Hillary Clinton and Madonna are talking about, that there is nothing being violated by these Muslims.
There's nothing essential, objective.
It's all about how we feel.
It's all about what's happening in your imagination because this is a narcissistic age.
But we got here in a very specific way.
I've talked about this before, but it's worth repeating.
All of the West, the cracked foundation stone of the West, is this meeting between Jesus and Pilate, where Jesus says, I'm here to tell the truth, to testify to the truth.
And Pilate says, what is truth?
And walks away.
This has played itself out over Western history.
And the crisis point kind of came in the 19th century when Frederick Nietzsche declared that God is dead, that's his famous line.
And in declaring God is dead, he said, there's now no longer any truth.
You know, he became Pontius Pilate.
Let me read to you just a brief piece of Nietzsche.
He said, judgments, value judgments on life, whether for or against, can ultimately never be true.
They have value only as symptoms.
They can be considered only as symptoms.
In themselves, such judgments are foolish.
He said, there are no facts, only interpretations.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
That is the predominant strain in our academic world.
And of course, academics love this because it's good for intellectuals.
Intellectuals like to take things apart, and you can take everything, you know, you can go ahead taking everything apart.
The other side of this, there are two other strains of thought.
One is the Christian strain, which was put forward by Dostoevsky in a book called Crime and Punishment.
And the amazing thing, if ever there was a prophet, Dostoevsky was a prophet.
He saw the progressives coming to take over communism.
Called them communists then.
But he saw them coming to take over the Russia.
He called them the devils.
He wrote a novel called The Devils in which he predicted basically the takeover of Russia by the communists.
But he wrote this book called Crime And Punishment before Nietzsche wrote his books, before Nietzsche published.
And yet it's obviously, clearly an argument with that strain of thought that Nietzsche would produce.
And crime and punishment is a guy who commits a murder and suddenly discovers that he feels bad, that he the, that he has broken the moral order.
Okay, Woody Allen has been arguing with Nietzsche, with Dostoevsky, his whole life he's been saying that no, there is no moral order.
You commit a murder, nothing happens, it's all luck, there is no justice.
Let's take a look he's.
He made two movies, Woody Allen.
One was called Crimes And Misdemeanors, so it sounds just like crime and punishment, and the other was called Matchpoint, in which a guy commits a murder based on crime and punishment, which is a piece of brilliant satire, I have to admit, even though it's insane.
But let's just listen to this piece from Crimes And Misidemeanor in which the murderer says, guilt goes away after a while and after the awful deed is done, he finds that he's plagued by deep-rooted guilt.
Little sparks of his religious background, which he'd rejected, are suddenly stirred up.
He hears his father's voice.
He imagines that God is watching his every move.
Suddenly it's not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he's violated it.
Now he's panic stricken.
He's on the verge of a mental collapse, an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police.
And then one morning he awakens and the sun is shining and his family is around him.
Mysteriously, the the crisis is lifted.
So what Woody Allen comes to feel is that because in Crime And Punishment, Raskolnikov, this murderer, comes to realize that he has violated the moral order.
And ultimately, it leads him in a path that we know is going to take him to Christianity.
And Dostoevsky was a Christian.
Woody Allen is saying, no, you know, yeah, we all have guilt and then we rationalize and then it goes away.
So how is that proof of a moral order?
The flaw in Woody Allen's reasoning.
Dostoevsky knew full well that there were people who committed murder without guilt.
Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia.
He was part of basically a discussion club that was decided they were anti-Czarists.
They took him out, lined him up to shoot him, lined him up against the wall, shouted, ready, aim, fire, and then didn't shoot him and took him away to Siberia.
So the guy looked down the barrel of death.
I mean, he just faced death in a way that most of us don't until we die.
Was taken away to Siberia, where he, this really sensitive intellectual, lived with some of the worst people in the world.
I mean, it was like Richard Pryor said, you know, you go to visit the brothers in prison and you think, thank God they have prisons.
They send him away to Siberia and he realized most of the people he was with, he was there for being in a book club, basically.
Most of the people he was with were murderers and they had no compunction about the murders they'd committed.
He knew full well that people commit murder and get away with it and have no guilt feelings at all.
What he was saying was, he was saying that the moral order is an objective reality that a man of conscience sees.
The fact that you go blind, the fact that you have no conscience, the fact that you're a Woody Allen character who doesn't have a conscience, no more makes the moral order go away than if I close my eyes, the furniture disappears.
The furniture is still there, I just can't see it.
So Woody Allen's making a very shallow, narcissistic mistake.
He's making the mistake that if he can't see the thing, it isn't there.
Dostoevsky is deducing the moral order from what he knows about his culture, from what he knows about Christianity.
Those are the two of the strains that Western culture has broken into.
One is the Christian strain that was represented by Dostoevsky, also represented by C.S. Lewis, who talked about this a lot, about the basic moral principles that you can't get rid of.
And the other strain is the Nietzschean strain, also called the postmodern or relativistic strain, where people think if you can't prove it, it ain't there, and it's all opinion, and nothing, as Hamlet says, predicting it all.
He says nothing's either, there is neither good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Those are two of the strains.
But there was a third strain, and we'll call it the British strain, okay?
This is the strain because the French kind of went in the Nietzschean direction.
That was why their revolution was as bloody as it was.
The Americans have been really a Christian country, but their founders were really part of the British strain.
And the British strain was this third strain that said there was a thing called natural law.
It doesn't really matter whether you're a Christian or not.
Nature, inherent in nature, there are certain axioms.
Axioms are like in mathematics, there are axioms that are things you can't prove, but the entire system of mathematics is based on them.
So A plus B equals B plus A is an axiom.
There's no proof of that.
It's a self-evident truth.
You just have to look at it to know it's true.
So the British strain of thought became, through John Locke and everything, became that there are self-evident truths.
And that was what Jefferson said, is we hold these truths to be self-evident.
They're axioms.
That all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, okay, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That strain of thought has been basically what has kept America afloat for 200 years.
But I have a question about that strain of thought.
Is it really self-evident?
Are those rights, is the fact that all men are created equal, is that a really self-evident truth?
Do we just look at that and know that to be true?
Or is it only self-evident if we are formed by millennia of Christianity?
It seems to me those truths are self-evident if we believe two things, if we believe that man is created in God's image, so that our reason responds to God.
Our reason is showing us something true.
When I say A plus B equals B plus A, that's going to work.
When I apply it to a desk, when I apply it to the sun, when I apply it to measurement, that's going to work.
And it's true of our conscience too.
Our conscience is created in God's image.
It is reflecting, when we have a healthy conscience, it's reflecting a true, real moral order.
The fact that our God incarnates himself as a man tells us a lot about how we feel about the dignity of humanity.
Man Created in God's Image00:03:47
It tells us that we think a human being is such, even if he's a broken image, he's such a dignified image that God himself can incarnate.
Now, this drives Muslims nuts, by the way.
I mean, seriously, serious, non-violent Muslims, they think this is absurd.
Jesus has a butt.
He has sexual organs.
He goes to the bathroom.
He sweats.
He bleeds.
He suffers.
The idea that God would suffer that indignity, could be reduced to that, is anathema to the Islamic idea of God.
To us, we just live with it.
We don't like to talk about it.
We don't think about it, but it's true.
We understand that Jesus is a full human and a full God.
And that says a lot about how we feel about humanity.
That means I have to listen to your opinion without running away to a safe space.
That means I have to debate with you and take your feelings into consideration.
That means your vision of God may have validity, even if it differs from my vision of God.
If you don't have those basic principles, if you don't have those basic principles, you're going to come to different conclusions.
And I think it is time, there's nothing bigoted, there's nothing bigoted in disagreeing with the Islamic worldview.
There's nothing bigoted in saying the Islamic worldview may be antithetical to everything we know to be true.
Not our values.
Our values are just opinions, but our morals, the things that we know to be self-evidently true.
There is nothing bigoted about saying that this philosophy may not fit in here.
We're not going to close mosques.
Donald Trump is not going to close any mosques.
But we might start thinking about how we regulate our borders.
We might start thinking about how we regulate immigration.
We might start thinking about what we require from our citizens, what we require our citizens to believe and how we require them to behave.
Because there is nothing bigoted about disagreeing with somebody else's worldview and having a country based on our worldview, which is the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Stuff I like.
Let me end by talking about Paris.
We conservatives give the French a very hard time.
They're cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
You know, they cheat on.
Every damn one of them seems to cheat on his wife.
I've never seen it.
It's almost like a point of honor with them.
They do not have the kind of religious, British, stiff upper lip, religious background that really comes naturally to Americans.
But if ever a country has contributed beauty into Western culture, it is this country.
I mean, the painting, the literature, some of their literature drives me nuts, and yet it's still incredibly beautiful and incredibly deep.
If there is a language more beautiful than French, I have never heard it.
If there are women more beautiful than French women, I've never seen them.
And if there is a city more beautiful than Paris, we're going to have to die before we see it.
Let me end with my favorite French singer, a guy named Charles Aznavour.
He is a, he's sometimes called the French Sinatra because he's kind of a tough little Algerian guy.
This is a song about Paris in August.
I don't think I have the, I've always just loved this guy.
I used to do a great imitation of him.
I don't have the voice to do it anymore.
But it's such a French song about Paris in August.
I have some translation here.
May God make it so that...
You almost have to say this in a French accent, but I won't.
May God make it so that my dream of still finding some remnants of the month of August on your lips, some remnant of Paris in your eyes, becomes reality and rekindles our crazy love so that everything may start again in Paris in the month of August.