Ep. 78’s Was Scalia Murdered? pits Andrew Clavin’s satirical takedown of election-era conspiracies—from Trump’s evasive Scalia claims to Bush’s WMD lies—against Professor Victoria Coates’ defense of Cruz’s pro-Israel stance and democratic heritage via art history. Coates, advisor to Cruz’s campaign, ties David’s Sling to civic resilience while warning of Supreme Court risks post-Scalia, dismissing leftist "Bush lied" narratives. Clavin contrasts this with 1943’s My Shining Hour, urging modern listeners to channel wartime resolve against political chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
In political news today, Hillary Clinton now says many women won't vote for her because they're women.
Many men won't vote for her because they're men.
Republicans won't support Obama's pick for the Supreme Court because Republicans are white.
And she says people should really stop being so bigoted and thinking about others in terms of the groups they're in.
Donald Trump is filing a lawsuit to make Ted Cruz stop saying negative things about him during a political campaign.
Trump also says secret papers will one day reveal the true perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks.
Antonin Scalia was smothered with a pillow by a clever murderer who then left the pillow over Scalia's head so no one would find the body.
And George W. Bush lied to the American people, Trump says, when he told them there were WMDs in Iraq.
The CIA, the NSA, the FBI, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and 295 other senators also lied in like a big conspiracy or something.
Bernie Sanders says some people have a lot of money and some people have only a little money, so we should take the money away from the people with a lot and give it to the people with only a little, and then everyone will have the same amount of money and be happy.
He also says there are too many different kinds of deodorant.
At least that's what I think he said.
It was hard to hear because I was edging away from him at the time.
Jeb Bush says he's still running for president.
Oh, wait, sorry.
Maybe he's serious.
I'm not sure.
All in all, in an election with the most grave consequences in many years, it's good to see that our candidates have set aside the clownish food fights of partisan politics and gotten down to the serious business of talking absolute nonsensical crap.
If this keeps up, it could spell the end for the United States of America, in which case, I personally am going to leave the country for Canada or Switzerland, where they enjoy continual prosperity and peace because they know they'll always be protected by the United States of America.
Oh, hold on a second.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Woof, it is getting crazy out there.
It is getting crazy.
You know, last time I went away for the weekend, you lost the Supreme Court, so I'm expecting to come back and find President Putin in the White House.
Just pardon me while I take a break, while I leave you in the clavenless abyss.
But really, this is one of the stupid.
I mean, it's one of the most important, most serious presidential elections ever, and some of the stupidest stuff is being said.
So today, we're going to try something.
We're going to go where this podcast has never gone before, in a technological miracle, which no one has ever done anywhere on earth, right?
We're going to actually use Skype on the internet.
Conspiracy Connections00:15:39
I know you've never seen this before, but we're going to interview a special guest, Professor Victoria Gardner Coates, who has written this excellent book, which I am about 20 pages away from finishing, called David's Sling, A History of Democracy and 10 Works of Art.
And she is a PhD in Italian Renaissance art, who is also a major fixture at the Ted Cruz campaign, has worked with Donald Rumsfeld, so a very, very interesting and intelligent lady.
And this is a really interesting book.
I've really enjoyed it.
And it has a lot to say about the history of democracy.
And since the history of democracy may be coming to an end, we might want to check in with her and find out what it was before it's over.
So before we get to that, you know, all week long, we've been talking about this idea basically of the way narrative creates an atmosphere in which you think you know things, but you really don't.
And the best example, I think, is the kind of narrative of scientific materialism, where you think you know there's no God and you think you know that the Bible is outmoded, which is actually the opposite of the truth, by the way.
If you actually look at science, a lot of things that are in the Bible can now be understood in a much better way.
But you think you know that.
The tone that you hear a lot of times when people are speaking out of that narrative without really thinking for themselves is they'll say, oh, come on.
Oh, come on.
That's ridiculous.
Oh, come on.
You know, you'll be talking.
You know, when Antonin Scalia talked about the fact that he believed in Satan and everybody said, oh, come on.
You know, you're talking to a guy with 152,000 IQ.
Oh, come on.
It's not really an argument.
You know, what you really should say is, wow, everybody seems to feel that's not true anymore.
How come the smartest man in America is still clinging to your Bible and your gun?
The narrative that I want to talk to, talk about a little, is this narrative about Antonin Scalia's death that I can just feel it snowballing.
So while we're here in this little island of sanity that we like to call the Andrew Clavin Show, I just would like to address for a minute this notion that Antonin Scalia was murdered, which is, you know, Drudge, in his very clever way, has kind of been highlighting stories that might make people think that this is true.
A pillow was found over his head.
And, you know, the autopsy, the family wants no autopsy, so there's not going to be an autopsy.
And of course, if there's any conspiracy theory, you know that Donald Trump is going to be playing it for whatever it's worth because he is just, he just knows, you know, he reminds me, if you go back and listen to my Christmas show about a Christmas carol, I talk about how a Christmas carol is one of the great works of wisdom literature, which I really believe is up there with the Tao Te Ching and with Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
I think it's just one of those things where like an angel from heaven hit Dickens on the head and he produced this incredible work of Western wisdom literature.
And in it, there's this wonderful scene where the spirit of Christmas present opens his robe and you see these two starving children and he says, this boy is ignorance.
This girl is want.
Beware them both, but most of all, beware this boy.
And Trump has just a way of playing into ignorance and sort of ginning up the suspicions of ignorance.
So here he is.
It's not his fault that this happened, but he's on the Michael Savage show and Savage is very big with this stuff.
And Savage questions him about this idea that Scalia might have been murdered.
Donald, I need to come back to the topic we've been all screaming about here, which is Scalia.
Was he murdered?
I know it's pretty brutal to say that.
And I'm not wanting to drag you into this, but this is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
I went on the air and said we need the equivalent of a warrant commission.
We need an immediate autopsy before the body is disposed of.
What do you think of that?
Well, I just heard today, and just a little while ago, actually, you know, I just landed and I'm hearing it's a big topic that's the question.
And it's a horrible topic, but they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow.
I can't tell you what, I can't give you an answer.
You know, usually I like to hear your answers, but I literally just heard it a little while ago.
It's just starting to come out now, as you know, Michael.
Well, I've been covering it for an hour and a half.
There's a lot more to it than that.
There was no medical examiner present.
There was no one who declared the death.
It was there.
It was done by telephone from a U.S. Marshal appointed by Obama himself.
So let me not try to drag you into something you haven't studied because I don't think it would be fair to you and to the audience.
I think after you look into these facts, Donald, you yourself will have to come to some different conclusions.
So Trump, no blame on Trump there.
He's hit with the question.
He has to answer the question.
He doesn't say anything.
But Trump is this conspiracy guy who was harping on Obama's birth certificate long after it was clear that Obama was born in the United States.
He has now said that George W. Bush lied about WMD when this thing has been studied down to the ground and it was clear that Bush was working completely off the intelligence that everybody in the Western world had the same intelligence.
So he just spews these things out.
Now you hear Savage starting to build this thing up.
You know, he had a pillow over his face.
He didn't have a pillow over his face.
He had a pillow over his head.
The guy who found him, he was at this ranch in a hunting trip, surrounded by admirers, people who thought he was a really wonderful guy, maybe didn't agree with him, but they were civilized people and all this.
They came in and found him.
He had spoken to his son.
His health was bad.
He had spoken to his son and told him that he felt that he knew his life could come to an end.
Scalia knew his life could come to an end at any minute.
He had discussed that with his family, as you would.
They came in and found him.
The guy who found him, the rancher, the guy who owned the ranch, John Poindexter, was trying to discuss how peaceful he looked.
And he said there was a pillow over his head.
He looked basically, he was saying he looked like he was asleep.
As for the way he was declared dead, in accordance with Texas law, the law officers who were on the scene called the judge.
The judge spoke to his personal physician.
The personal physician said, basically, look, this was in the cards.
You know, she is allowed by Texas law to say that just to declare him dead.
She's not declaring anything, you know, any cause of death or anything else.
Somebody offhand said he had a heart attack, and apparently that may not be true.
The family, for obvious reasons, doesn't want an autopsy.
Now, it seems clear to me there should be an autopsy just to stop this nonsense from taking place.
But there's nothing, you know, the thing about conspiracies, this is what always bothers me about conspiracies.
They invent conspiracies when they don't need them.
So, you know, 9-11, the Islamists say, we're going to blow up the World Trade Center.
They blow up the World Trade Center, and then they say, We've blown up the World Trade Center.
And people go, Hmm, I wonder who really blew up the World Trade Center.
You think, like, I don't actually think you need a theory.
It's not like, you know, you found a body in the library with an arrow sticking out of it.
You know, it's like these guys, these Islamists who hate us, blew up the World Trade Center.
You know, this is a very similar situation.
You know, you don't need a conspiracy.
The one that really started this or made it mainstream was JFK.
And JFK is an exact example of this.
And you heard Savage reference the Warren Commission, which was brought into study who killed JFK.
JFK was a powerful Cold War president.
If you go back and listen to John F. Kennedy's speeches today, he sounds like a Republican.
This was back in the days when Republicans and Democrats really weren't that far apart, no matter how much they hated each other.
And this is the guy who got up and said, you know, we're going to bear any burden, pay any price to defend our liberty.
This is Kennedy.
He's killed by a communist.
He's killed by a guy who tried to defect to the USSR.
You know, this guy who was really upset about how Kennedy was treating Cuba and he was worried about Cuba.
And so he killed the president, right?
And immediately, this is within hours of the killing.
Immediately the news media, which was left-wing and did not want to believe that the Soviet Union was bad.
You know, they didn't want to believe that this was the evil empire that Reagan would later have to explain to them that it was, which was shocking when he said that.
They immediately started to talk about how hate killed JFK.
Hate killed JFK.
And they would show, and people did hate.
He was the president.
People hated JFK.
He was in Dallas where there were southern bigots who were unhappy about JFK's civil rights policies.
And so the news media would start to focus on this.
Here's this communist in custody, tried to kill a cop with the rifle that killed the bread.
And this conspiracy has gotten to the point where literally it is now the byword for things we don't know.
One day we'll find out who really killed, you know.
And of course it culminated in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, in which, you know, I brought in just a little clip.
And here's the experiment I want you to do.
Okay, if you have a minute, either go on yourself on YouTube and look at this clip or watch the movie itself.
And instead of thinking of the movie as letting the story tell itself, think of the movie as the expression of schizophrenia and paranoia.
I mean, think of it as a mental, as a scene of mental illness.
Watch this.
This is the summation.
The story of JFK is the story of Jim Garrison, who was a New Orleans DA who brought this local businessman to trial for killing, for being part of a right-wing conspiracy.
Of course, because it couldn't have been a left-winger who shot this Cold War president.
It couldn't have been a communist who shot that.
So it must have been a right-wing conspiracy within the government.
It was a coup d'état, according to this movie, to stop JFK from pulling out of Vietnam.
It was this crazy theory.
The jury dismissed this case.
The jury decided this case within an hour, okay?
Threw it out in an hour.
They said, no way was this guy guilty.
All right, so Kevin Costner, at the top, tippy top of his stardom, right, looking great, is out there making the summation.
Sissy Spacek, who is as beautiful as the wife, as any movie wife could be, is watching with tears, her eyes filling with tears as he talks about emotion.
He starts out, it's a little hard to hear what he starts out by quoting Tennyson, the poet Tennyson, saying, authority deserts a dying king.
In other words, when a king dies, all his authority vanishes.
And he's asking the jury to remember this as they decide this case.
So just listen to this for a minute.
Tennyson wrote, authority forgets a dying king.
This was never more true than for John F. Kennedy, whose murder was probably one of the most terrible moments in the history of our country.
You, the people, the German system sitting in judgment on Clay Shaw, represent the hope of humanity against government power.
In discharging your duty and bringing the first conviction in this House of Cards against Clay Shaw, that's not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
Do not forget your dying king.
Show this world that this is still a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Nothing as long as you live will ever be more important.
Now, one of the things that happens in movies is that little sick people write stories that then get portrayed by very, very handsome, glamorous actors.
So some creepy little movie exec has an affair, cheats on his wife in this sleazy way, and then gets Richard Gere to play in the movie Intersection, having an affair with Sharon Stone, and suddenly it's glamorized.
This cheap, lousy thing that this guy did to his wife suddenly becomes a glamorized story.
If you watch this movie as the expression of schizophrenic paranoia, if you watch that speech where Kevin Costner, first of all, Kennedy wasn't the king.
He was a president.
He wasn't the dying king.
He wasn't like King Arthur.
That's ridiculous, you know.
If you watch the overblown rhetoric, you know, ask not what's your country, the quotes, and, you know, this is the most important thing you'll ever do in your life.
That's the way these guys talk.
Conspiracy theories grow out of two things.
One, they grow out of when an event occurs that shatters your worldview and you're trying to save your worldview.
So Kennedy was killed by a communist.
Oh my goodness, maybe the communists aren't such nice guys.
No, let's not let our worldview get shattered.
Let's invent this conspiracy.
9-11 happens.
Maybe multiculturalism is not as good an idea as we thought it was.
Maybe all you know, all things, there is no morality, all cultures are exactly the same.
Maybe not so much.
No, don't let your philosophy get shattered.
Invent a conspiracy theory where the buildings are blown up.
The other thing that happens, which I think is more to the case right now, is sometimes things just stink.
Sometimes bad things happen.
I wish Scalia had lived until the next president, and I hope the next president is Cruz or Rubio or somebody who will appoint a decent judge.
He didn't.
He died before that.
It's a bad break.
And when you listen to the conspiracy theorists, guys like Alex Jones, who come on and say this, what they say to you is, look, look, you know, we have all these important decisions coming up.
This guy was, you know, Obama's just about to leave office.
Who would believe that he would just die?
But of course, people, those things happen.
And to get rid of the existential angst of life, people invent these things.
And you should not let that narrative take hold at all.
Let's try this, guys.
Let's try our guest.
Let's bring on our guest, Victoria Gardner Coates, who is the author of David's Sling.
There you are.
You're actually there.
I'm so excited.
How are you?
It's nice to see you, Professor.
How are you doing?
Very nice to be here.
Thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure.
I'm 20 pages away from finishing your book.
I'm really, I really like it.
And one of the things I really like about it is, as I hope the audience can see, it is a beautiful coffee table book.
You can see it is well illustrated, has all the works of art in it, but it actually has a text that's worth reading.
First of all, before, let me just read a little bit of your resume from the back of the book.
You are a cultural historian who received her PhD in Italian Renaissance art from the University of Pennsylvania.
You have served as a senior fellow at the Commonwealth, all these wonderful places, but you're current, you also worked as the director of research in the office of Donald Rumsfeld, where you provided editorial support for his best-selling memoir, Known and Unknown.
You are currently a senior staff member for national security at the United States Senate and the senior advisor for foreign policy for Ted Cruz's campaign.
So explain to me the connection between the, first of all, you know, what do you do in your spare time?
No, I'm joking, but explain to me.
Exactly.
Explain to me the connection between your PhD in Renaissance art and this expertise in world events.
Well, it is an interesting connection.
And I think the concept of being an art historian is something that's taken some knocks recently.
Everyone from President Obama to Senator Rubio have actually criticized the discipline as somehow esoteric.
And I think it's really just a specialized kind of history.
And as you learned from David's Sling, my argument is that we can learn as much from looking at the Parthenon about ancient Athens as we can from reading Thucydides.
And so this is just an argument for expanding our historical knowledge.
And the gentleman you mentioned, Secretary Rumsfeld and Senator Cruz, are both people who have a very keen understanding of history and have been interested in having a historian's perspective as an advisor.
Interesting.
Cultural Heritage and Democracy00:13:08
So to talk about the book, David Sling, it's called The History of Democracy and 10 Works of Art.
And you take these works of art and you give them sort of a political twist.
You sort of show where they fit in to the history, to various places where democracy has sprung up in Greece, in Rome, in Florence, in Venice.
Talk about why it's called David's Sling.
I mean, we've all seen at least pictures.
I was very proud, by the way, to have seen, I have seen each one of these works of art in person, so I was very proud of them.
Good for you.
Thank you.
You're going to pass the exam.
I know.
I'm studying as we speak.
So talk about why it's called David's Sling.
What was it about Michelangelo's David that we've all seen in Florence that speaks to the history of democracy?
Well, and that really, the David was the kingpin object for this.
Originally, it was going to be a single object study on that statue because most people know it as the ideal of male beauty, the Renaissance man.
But very few people know that Michelangelo was a very highly political artist.
He was a just devoted fan of the Florentine Republic.
He fought for the Republic.
And this was a commission of the Republic while the Medici were exiled.
And so that original context to me really added a great deal of meaning to a statue, which, as you said, we all know well.
And then the other objects I discovered, they all kind of raised their hands like the minions in Despicable Me and said that they wanted to be picked because they were all deliberately created to commemorate free systems.
And that was really the fun thing about the book, particularly with the Monet chapter, the ninth chapter.
A lot of critics have had a problem with it because they don't like to think of Monet as a political artist.
They think of him, as Cézanne said, as an eye.
And as it turns out, he was.
And it was Monet who wrote to Clemenceau the day after the armistice of World War I and offered to give the nation his paintings as a way to participate in the victory of the Third Republic.
Monet knew exactly what he was doing, and we shouldn't misunderstand him.
That leapt out at me, too, I have to say.
I was thinking, water lilies, really?
But you make a very powerful case that this was a celebration of the peace and the victory of World War I. David Sling, when you talk about that, you're basically talking about a weapon meant to defend the Republic, right?
Is that not true?
They were talking about having not only David guard the city of Florence, but also a statue of Hercules, as I remember.
Oh, yes.
But the thing with the sling, I'm sorry, I dropped that piece of the question, is the sling is the artificial element that allows David to triumph, that he has his pure faith and he also has his ingenuity.
And so I really understand the sling as a metaphor for democracy, which has catapulted these 10 societies, actually nine.
The French had to try a couple of times, so they got two chapters.
The sling is what actually allows these remarkable triumphs of free systems.
And one of the fun coincidences of the book, and I wish I had been smart enough to plan this, is David Sling is, of course, the name of the next generation of Israeli missile defense.
Which is something Senator Cruz was talking about on Tuesday in South Carolina.
Didn't mention the book, so he got a black mark, but he did talk about missile defense system.
And I think that really the notion that in our day, that is David Sling.
That's what's going to defend and protect the wonderful, vibrant democracy in the Middle East that our ally Israel.
You know, when they talked about having Hercules and David defend the country, defend the Republic of Florence, it made me think of the kind of dual inheritance of Athens and Jerusalem that they obviously were thinking of.
And one of the things that surprised me about the book is when I think about European art, if somebody says the words European art, immediately I think of a million Madonna's, a million nativities, a million crucifixions that are always in the European room of any museum.
But there's no religious, I mean, except for David, who is a biblical figure, none of your 10 works of art are religious.
I wonder if that was intentional or just the way it turned out.
It was the way it turned out, but of course St. Mark's is a church.
And so I think that there is some crossover there.
But I absolutely agree with you.
I mean, this is a book about civic art and that kind of achievement of Western civilization.
And as I say in the introduction, the vast majority of Western art is produced by empire or church.
And so it's all the more remarkable that these pieces were produced by democracies.
But my next book is actually going to be a history of Christianity and 10 works of art.
So we'll get some of those in there.
Oh, boy, that sounds great.
So you're not saying that there's necessarily a relationship between democracy and creativity.
You're not making that argument.
I'm not saying it's exclusive, but I'm saying there is a relationship.
And the fact that democracies, many of them in this book, very small.
I mean, you think about it, Athens was a rock.
Rome was a swamp.
Venice shouldn't have existed at all.
The United States was a wilderness.
And then you think about how amazingly above their weight these states punched.
And so that is really the extraordinary story of David Sling, is how unexpected it is.
You know, one of the things I'm constantly ranting about is the way that conservatives exempt themselves from the culture.
Conservatives tend to turn away from the culture of the moment, the modern culture.
And one story that just leapt out at me in the book is the story of Manet's picture of the picnic in the grass with the nude between the two dressed men, and this caused a fur.
And Emil Zola came out and said, no, no, you know, you look at nudes all the time if they're classical nudes, but when you see a modern nude, suddenly you go crazy.
That strikes me as being so true today that people will watch a Shakespeare play in which a guy's eyes are put out on stage, but if they turn on the sopranos, they go like, oh man, that's terrible.
I'm not going to watch that.
You know, that's wrong.
Does this bother you?
Do you feel that conservatives have abandoned the culture, the arts?
Well, I don't know that they've so much abandoned them.
I mean, I do think they feel very alienated from them.
And it's an interesting issue that so many of our modern artists, musicians, designers tend to be extremely liberal.
And I think the argument that's going on over the Eisenhower Memorial right now in Washington is a case in point where you have Frank Gehry design.
Gehry is a great architect.
He was wonderful for Bilbao.
But this design for this particular monument in Washington has not been a success.
And it alienated the Eisenhower family, as well as most conservatives who want to commemorate Eisenhower as they understand him, as a war hero, as a great president, leader of the 20th century.
And so you do have that tension.
But at the same time, I think, going back to my original point about art history, I think one thing we're in danger of doing is abandoning our own culture, because we are in a civilizational struggle.
We may not want to be in one, but the fact is that we are.
And the radical Islamists who are trying to tear down our civilization understand it that way.
The Ayatollah Khameni came out right after Christmas and said that he found Western culture an intolerable insult to him.
And the fact that it exists anywhere on the planet is an affront.
And so I think that I'm not in the business of tearing down other people's cultures, but I am in the business of defending ours.
And I think that as we deal with this threat right now, a book like David Sling that celebrates that culture and these achievements is all the more important and can really encourage conservatives to embrace this heritage.
Well, that leads me to the question, as I'm reading this book and I'm going from chapter to chapter, I couldn't help but notice that, as you say, that democracy is like a spirit that springs up in a certain place and then flits away as they foolishly let it die and then springs up again.
And the spirit of freedom never dies, but it does seem to move from place to place.
And some of us are quite worried looking at the kind of clown show that's going on in our electoral process at a moment that does strike me.
It does strike me as a crucial moment.
You know, it's obviously not an emergency like the Civil War or World War II, but it does seem to me kind of a crucial moment when we have a major force trying to kill us on the one hand, our Supreme Court in the balance and all this.
Do you think America is in danger of letting go of our republic?
Well, I very much hope not.
The conclusion, which will be sneaking up on you shortly, is.
I did skip ahead and read the conclusion.
Well, it's about Tocqueville.
It gave me a lot of confidence in the book that it starts with the Book of Samuel and it ends with Tocqueville.
So those seemed like pretty powerful twin poles to move between.
But Tocqueville really had a very profound warning before the Civil War that liberty was the easiest thing to lose, that when you take it for granted, you then kind of lapse into a weakened state in which tyranny can reassert itself and that tyranny is always there.
It's almost like the intelligent force for evil that we don't want to think exists, but it's there and it's actually trying to reassert itself over any free system.
So I do think right now is a very powerful moment.
It's one reason I'm extremely proud to work for Senator Cruz is he continues to talk about very serious issues.
Not to harp on his Tuesday speech, but he's the only one who's laid out a detailed plan to rebuild our military so that our enemies will fear us.
And ironically, he wants to rebuild the military so he would be less likely as commander-in-chief to have to use it.
And what he finds very disturbing, and I do too, is the degree to which we are voluntarily surrendering in this fight.
You know, we are doing things like apologizing for our culture.
You have the Italian prime minister putting boxes around nude statues on the Capitol Iron Hill.
So the Iranian president isn't offended.
I mean, that was just for me a shocking moment.
Because as you know from chapter two of David Sling, the Capitoline Hill is sacred ground for the Western tradition.
And if Rouhani doesn't want to look at a statue, he can look away.
If he doesn't want to have wine with lunch, he can ask for a glass of water.
We shouldn't be self-censoring ourselves and voluntarily surrendering.
And I really see the things, the policies of President Obama, things like allowing in unvetted Syrian refugees as a huge issue, as voluntarily opening ourselves up to harm.
And that's the sort of thing that I think Senator Cruz would be very powerfully able to change.
Yeah, you know, I found your book after Dan Henninger mentioned it in his column about the Rouhani Italian.
Oh, I have to write it.
I think that's it.
You should, yes.
That was a great, great advertisement.
Well, let me ask you as a final question.
We here at the Daily Wire are quite fond of your man, Senator Cruz.
And it seems to us, it seems to us that he's in a fight with a schoolyard bully.
Let me speak for myself.
It seems to me that he's in a fight with a spoiled brat of a schoolyard bully who, to my dismay, my great dismay, is getting followers from what I think of as the good guys.
And how is he holding up under that?
Has he got a strategy for fighting back against that?
It's almost as if they are in two separate boxing rings fighting two different fights, one fighting for the country and the other fighting for Donald Trump.
And yet people are cheering Trump on.
Well, it's a great show.
I mean, it is a good show, I admit.
It's very engaging.
And certainly, I think Mr. Trump should be commended for some of his efforts on issues like immigration, on refugees, political correctness.
I mean, these positions he takes have not always been consistent.
But in this case, in those cases, I think he has forced a dialogue on vital issues.
Now, you know, I'm a foreign policy advisor, so I don't want to speak to campaign strategy, but I can say it is deeply concerning to me when you have somebody who says, for example, he'll be neutral in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
You know, as somebody who just wrote a book called David Sling, you know, I'm not neutral in that fight, and I don't think the United States should be any more than the Palestinians supporters are neutral.
I mean, their avowed goal is to wipe Israel off the map.
So I think that we need to be a little bit more robust and forthright in our support for our ally.
You know, so that would be a case where I think there's a very strong policy difference between them.
And we're really encouraged.
You know, we had that NBC poll yesterday.
That's a little, I mean, maybe a little bit unusual, but it could be an indicator of how things are shifting.
Because I really don't think a lot of Americans understand that there were problems around the Iraq War.
Shining Hour Of Courage00:03:46
You know, that's something I've studied very carefully, and I understand that.
But they don't want to be told that, you know, Bush lied us into war.
They know that's not the case.
They know that's a far-left talking point.
And it's very disturbing to hear that out of someone who could be the nominee of the Republican Party.
So, we're very much hoping that Senator Cruz's message is getting out, is resonating.
And people, particularly after the passing of Justice Scalia, the reason I'm actually still in Washington right now is we'll be going, he's lying in repose at the Supreme Court tomorrow, and I wanted to personally pay my respects.
But after his passing, when you were just talking about the importance of the court, the fact that we're one justice away from losing the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, I mean, abortion, these are very serious issues.
And that's what I think Senator Cruz can really speak to.
Professor Coates, thank you very much for coming on.
It is kind of reassuring after watching television and seeing the level of people on TV to know that there are people of your level behind the scenes.
I appreciate it.
The book is excellent.
It's called David's Sling: A History of Democracy in 10 Works of Art.
I will finish it tonight.
It's been a pleasure talking to you.
Thank you very much for coming.
Great.
Thank you, Andrew, very much.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Yeah, it's reassuring to know.
And also that our machinery works, right?
So let's conclude the week with stuff I like.
You know, one of the reasons I keep going back to these old songs, I realized as I was kind of reflecting on the news today, one of the reasons I keep going back to these old songs is not just because I happen to think the lyrics were better, more sophisticated, more interesting, but a lot of them were written around World War II.
And so they have this quality, this wistful quality of sorrow and yet courage that I think is very appropriate and relevant to our moment.
This one is written by in 1943 by two of the greatest of all American songwriters.
Harold Arlen wrote the music, Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics, and it's called My Shining Hour.
And it was meant to echo in a love song Winston Churchill's call for courage when he said to the British Empire, If we last for a thousand years, this, our defense of democracy against the forces of evil, will be our finest hour.
And so they wrote this love song called My Shining Hour.
It's in a movie called The Sky's the Limit, being sung by Joan Leslie.
Just take a listen to it.
It's a very wistful, haunting song.
This will be my shining hour.
Calm and happy every time.
In my dreams, your faith will flower through the darkness of the night like the lights of horn before me or an angel watching o'er me.
This will be my shining hour till I'm with you again.
All right, my shining hour.
Remember, folks, please remember that no matter what happens in a democracy, in the fight for freedom, courage and hope are not luxuries.
They are requirements.
So no despair.
Don't let the country die while I'm gone.
Please, I mean, come on.
Stay vigilant.
Thank you for listening this week.
Come back again and listen and watch the Andrew Clavin Show.