Ep. 151 dissects the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton over 110 classified emails, exposing her repeated lies—yet political immunity shields her, while Trump’s "crooked Hillary" narrative gains traction. Legal analyst Andy McCarthy’s critique of Comey’s intent loophole is dismissed as moot, underscoring how wealth and power override accountability. The episode then pivots to "critical theory," arguing it unfairly judges nations like Germany or America by past sins (Holocaust, slavery) while ignoring their global legacies—freedom, capitalism, and defeating tyranny. Flashman novels are hailed as a counter to moralizing history, framing conflict as inevitable among competing groups. Ultimately, the show warns of a rule-of-law crisis where elites evade consequences while cultural relativism distorts historical reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrat candidate for gangster-like president Hillary Clinton is joyfully celebrating the conclusion of the FBI's criminal investigation into her use of a private email server.
Yahoo! she crowed at her latest campaign stop.
The FBI says I am extremely careless with classified material and may even have violated the law, but I will not be prosecuted.
This is a banner day for me and for America.
Touring the country with President Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton told a crowd of wildly cheering New York Times reporters, quote, I have told you repeatedly that I never knowingly sent any classified emails, and today the FBI has completely confirmed that I knowingly sent classified emails over 100 times.
I've told you again and again I dutifully turned over all relevant emails to investigators, and now the FBI has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was just so lying about that too.
But the main point is, I'm not going to be prosecuted.
So hip, hip, hooray, and you should elect me president, unquote.
Pointing to President Obama, Mrs. Clinton said, you know, eight years ago, this man humiliated me in front of the entire country.
And yet when he needed me to lie for him about the causes of the Benghazi killings, I lied like a house on fire.
And that's why I'm standing before you today completely unindicted.
In fact, when I think back to my marriage to Bill, I realize that letting a man humiliate me and then lying to protect him has been a path to power for me all along.
So I just want to say to every girl in America, let your men humiliate you and then lie for them.
And you too could one day not be indicted.
In an interview later with CNN anchor woman Fawn Tody, a smiling Mrs. Clinton said, quote, from very early on in my political career, a vast right-wing conspiracy has been trying to destroy me.
They said my husband was an adulterer, that I unethically accepted money from the heads of foreign governments while in office, that I knowingly lied about the causes of the Benghazi massacre, and that I mishandled classified materials.
And all those things were true.
In fact, when you think about it, it's been a very honest conspiracy.
But the only important point is that they said I was above the law, and that has also turned out to be true.
So yay for me, unquote.
In the wake of the FBI's report, President Obama threw his full support to Mrs. Clinton, saying, quote, this is a woman who's probably allowed America's secrets to be hacked by our enemies, but no one can prove it, so I'm behind her 100%, unquote.
Some Clinton supporters voiced concerns that Republican candidate Donald Trump would take advantage of the FBI revelations of Mrs. Clinton's habitual dishonesty and corruption.
Mr. Trump responded to these concerns by putting on a clown suit, setting himself on fire, and riding a unicycle off the roof of an office building while screaming, I hate blacks and Jews.
Polls now show Trump trailing Clinton by 300 percentage points, although both candidates are polling behind O.J. Simpson and tapeworms.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clinton, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
It's a great day for Hillary.
She's not going to be indicted.
Let's elect her president.
I know.
All right, it's mailbag day.
Yahoo.
See, Lindsay isn't here.
We don't have somebody to say woohoo.
So you guys, you screw.
That was terrible.
And mailbag day comes at the end of the show, so you have to stick with us.
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All right, we've all had time to think and reflect and weep for the end of the rule of law.
I think we should now assess what happened yesterday as Comey said that he, you know, that Hillary Clinton had violated the law, but she was not going to be prosecuted.
First of all, I want to say right now, my point of view is that Comey is an honest man.
I don't go for any conspiracy theories.
I don't think he was blackmailed.
I don't think he was intimidated.
I don't think you intimidate a guy like Comey.
I really don't.
I think, you know, if I put myself in his position, there is nothing they could come to me with where I wouldn't say, if they said, oh, we're going to reveal that you did this terrible thing.
I would go before the press and say they blackmailed me, you know, publish and be damned.
And I think Comey is a tough guy.
I think he's a guy with a reputation for honesty.
I don't think he was backing down at all.
I think he was being absolutely straightforward in saying that he did not believe that someone in Hillary Clinton's position was going to be indicted.
He then went forward and he addressed every single thing that she has told the press and the public and showed it to be untrue.
Our friends at reason.com put up this tape just comparing his statements to her statements.
I did not email any classified material to anyone.
There is no classified material.
110 emails in 52 email chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.
I provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related.
Several thousand work-related emails that were not among the group of 30,000 emails returned by Secretary Clinton.
I thought using one device would be simpler.
She also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read email.
There were no security breaches.
It is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account.
It was my practice to communicate with State Department and other government officials on their .gov accounts.
Hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account.
No doubt that we've done exactly what we should have done.
They were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.
People will be able to judge for themselves.
We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences.
Americans will find that interesting, and I look forward to having a discussion about that.
So basically, every word out of the woman's mouth is untrue, is a knowing lie.
And listen to the way that Comey addressed each one.
I mean, the guy is a smart guy.
He wasn't doing that accidentally.
He was saying to you, you know, if you've got somebody who hasn't got endless resources, what the law enforcement typically does, they did this to Dinesh D'Souza, is they come to you and say, we have enough charges to put you away for 20 years.
But if you plead guilty, we'll give you six months.
That's what they did to Dinesh D'Souza.
And you look at that and you think, am I going to go, you know, live with 15, 20 years in prison hanging over my head for the next two years while I go to trial and sit in a trial and all this stuff?
No, I'm going to plead guilty even though I didn't do it or maybe I did do something wrong.
They've got enough on me to get me for something.
That's not going to work with Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton has got hundreds of millions of dollars to spend.
No one's going to touch her.
Nothing's going to happen.
Comey knows that and he is being a realistic prosecutor and he's getting justice.
I mean, that, I think the only thing that he did that was strategic instead of just doing his job was give that press conference because he could have handed it over to Loretta Lynch in the Justice Department and said, look, my ultimate recommendation is that you're not going to nail her, so don't spend the public's money going after her.
That would have been a totally honest, totally reasonable thing to do.
But he knew, he knew these people would bury it and exonerate her.
And their big shout line, as we say in Hollywood, would be, you know, she's guilty, she's innocent, there's no charges, and that would be the story.
He did not let that happen.
He came out and did exactly the right thing.
He exposed her at every step.
Everything she said, every word she said was a lie, and now everybody knows it.
Politically, just talking about this as a political event, if you are a Donald Trump supporter, or if you're simply a never-Hillary person or somebody who just wants to see the Republicans win, this is the best thing that could have happened to you.
The best thing.
This is like if you're sitting around and complaining about this politically, I can understand complaining about it from a rule of law perspective, but if you're complaining about it politically, you're out of your mind.
Because if he indicts her, if he recommends indictment and they indict her, she goes down, she resigns, and Joe Biden and probably Elizabeth Warren become the candidates and they cream Donald Trump.
I mean, there's no, Biden is a, you know, despite all the gaffes and the fact that he has the IQ of a turnip, you know, Biden is a popular guy.
He's friendly.
Both sides like him in the House and the Senate.
You know, they're not going to stab him the way they're going to go after Hillary.
Hillary has made a lot of enemies.
She's even made enemies in the press.
I mean, the fact that, you know, there are people in the press, the elites who think she's one of them and they love her, but they have lied and treated the press like dirt.
And there are people in the media even who don't like her.
She's the best candidate we're going to get it.
Anybody, if Trump can beat anybody, and that's questionable, but if he can beat anybody, she's the one.
So we should be perfectly, you know, if you're in favor of the Democrats being defeated, as I am, never mind whether you're in favor of Trump being elected, this is the best political outcome that you could get.
Trump knows it too.
I think Trump handled this really well yesterday.
First of all, listen to who he appeals to.
And this shows you something about Trump being kind of canny, maybe even cannier than the people who are attacking him.
Play Trump talking about Bernie, not the O'Reilly one, the other one.
Who's the most angry about this?
I think the one with the most to lose is Bernie Sanders.
Because honestly, he was waiting for the FBI primary.
And guess what?
He just lost today the FBI primary.
He lost the FBI primary bernie, my poor Bernie.
Oh, Bernie, I feel so badly for Bernie.
But you know what?
A lot of Bernie Sanders supporters are going to be voting for Trump because Bernie Sanders was right.
Bernie Sanders was right about a couple of things.
He's right about the system being rigged, but he's also right about trade.
Our trade deals are a disaster.
They're killing our jobs.
They're killing our families.
They're killing our incomes.
I mean, people in this room, many people in this room, and I'm going to fight for you because it's going to be changed fast.
Many people in this room are making less money today than they made 18 years ago.
Okay.
So think about what Trump sees here.
Okay.
He doesn't say like, oh, I got burned.
Trump has been saying, well, everybody's been attacking, Trump has been saying the election hasn't started yet.
And those of us who pay attention to politics think that's crazy.
He's right.
He is right.
Nobody's paying attention.
Nobody is paying attention.
Trump is a clown car, so they're paying attention to that.
It's interesting.
Hillary, the lying Hillary is interesting and all that stuff.
But nobody is really thinking about this yet.
There's a lot of the country who's going to vote for Hillary no matter what.
A lot of the people are going to pull the Republican lever no matter what.
But those few people who are in between who decide elections in this country, you know, is it an election year, really?
You know, it's like, is it, you know, I think it's time for the bachelorette.
You know, I don't think this is what they're paying attention to.
What he knows, what he knows, is the people who are angriest about this are not Trump supporters because Trump's best shot is about Hillary.
Trump's best shot is against Hillary.
So Trump supporters aren't upset.
Bernie supporters.
And these people, you know, everybody's covering the disjunction in the Republican Party as if nothing were going on in the Democrat Party.
But the Democrat Party is very, very dissatisfied.
They don't like their candidate.
They like Bernie.
There are all these idealistic young people who think don't know, haven't gotten the big word yet about socialism and the whole slavery and dishonesty and collapse thing.
They haven't heard about that yet.
Okay, so they're, you know, they're, they love their Bernie, and they're the ones who got cheated, and he knows it, and he's going out there and he's appealing to them.
Plus, the other thing that's going on is a battle of the brands.
And this is the thing, this is the thing that happens before the election takes place.
This is where Mitt Romney lost the election.
While Mitt Romney was sitting around wondering about policy and wondering about this and who he was going to have as his running mate, Barack Obama was branding him as a plutocratic, uncaring guy who beat up gay people in high school and put his dog on the roof.
All that branding was being done way, way in advance.
And Trump is a master of that.
So here's Trump with O'Reilly, just kind of getting at the visceral feeling of this whole event, the visceral feeling of what it's like when Hillary gets off with all these lies.
She knew what was going on, and frankly, even if she didn't, what she did was wrong.
And, you know, whether you had intent or not is not the defining characteristic of this, you can make a mistake and you're still guilty, you know, because you're talking about national security.
And there are a lot of reasons for guilt.
So it's very, very surprising.
To me, I think it's really surprising.
And I'm not just talking about from today from Director Comey.
I'm talking about, generally speaking, people would say there's no way she can avoid this because of what's happened to other people.
But you believe that she did it on purpose, don't you?
Well, I certainly believe something's strange, Af, because when you put your servers in basements and when you, you know, look at all of the information that was just wiped clean, whether by lawyer or anybody else.
And I just look at it, and we know that she had, you know, classified information on her server, and she said she didn't have classified information on her server.
So when you look at all of the facts, she certainly lied.
At a minimum, she lied.
And you're not supposed to be lying when you're dealing at this level.
And then you have the husband going around in the tarmac.
And I've been on a lot of tarmacs, and nobody ever runs into your plane.
And he talked for 39 minutes about his grandchildren and about golf.
It's not the way life is.
Okay.
We've got to say goodbye to all our viewers on Facebook.
Come over to the Daily Wire and watch some more and subscribe and you can keep watching and be in the mailbag.
So Trump gets exactly what people see.
I mean, exactly what people see.
Something just strange, the servers in the basement, the meetings on the tarmac with Clinton.
This is dirty stuff.
And we know she lied.
We know she lied.
Damning Evidence Revealed00:04:11
So he is branding her as crooked Hillary.
If you don't think, you know, what Hillary is doing is branding Trump as racist Trump.
And that gets a lot, that has a lot of weight because Trump is a big mouth and he's not politically correct.
I don't actually think Trump is a racist.
I think he scurrilously winks and nods at people who are racists, at white supremacists and anti-Semites.
I think he gives them the wink and the nod.
But his history is not like that.
You know, he's supposed to be anti-female.
He's promoted women in the construction industry where they don't get a lot of promotions or didn't in his day when he was really doing it.
He has been absolutely fine about the Jews.
His daughter's a Jew, married to a Jew, and all this stuff.
You know, that's not who he is.
But she's branded him that way.
I mean, Mitt Romney is not an uncaring plutocrat, but they branded him that way.
Okay, so she has succeeded in branding him as racist and sexist.
He has succeeded in branding her as crooked.
And if you don't think he has watched this, this is from Ann Althaus.
Ann Althaus has a wonderful legal blog, and she caught ABC's Martha Raditz reading one of Trump's tweets.
And you have to watch this, but I'll describe it when we get back from it.
Just play the Ann Raditz quote as she reads a Trump tweet.
This and Donald Trump as well, and it does have resonance.
He said, it is impossible for the FBI not to recommend criminal charges against crooked Hillary Clinton.
What she did was wrong.
What Bill did was stupid.
I trust we'll hear a lot more about that.
And as she's reading it, they're showing the Trump tweet, and she says charges against crooked Hillary Clinton.
The word crooked isn't even there.
She sees it, but it's not there.
So if you, that's Ann Althaus caught that.
That's great.
Because, you know, if you don't think this brand is working, and in the end, in the end, which is worse, obviously being crooked is worse.
And I think that Trump knows what he, you know, he knows what he's doing.
He has a feel for this.
I think he's lost his footing a little bit in the general election.
But, you know, it's a question of whether he'll find it again.
He can be clownish.
The press is going to seize on everything he does to pull the news cycle away from her corruption.
But her corruption is pretty rife.
So that's the politics of it.
In terms of the rule of law, Andy McCarthy, my friend, is a great federal prosecutor, friend of Comey.
He came out and he hit Comey pretty hard.
He said, in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.
The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense.
The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets.
When they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they're guilty of serious wrongdoing.
The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant.
People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.
We made this point yesterday.
But the point is, the point is, it doesn't matter.
If he thought he wasn't going to get an indictment, there was no point in him going in and recommending an indictment.
His point was that normally this doesn't happen.
Normally, people don't get prosecuted if they can't prove intent.
You know, the important thing here, the important thing, is that if we lived in a country that was working well, what Comey did would have destroyed Hillary Clinton yesterday.
To point out that many lies, repeated lies, less than that, less than that, destroyed Richard Nixon.
Remember, Richard Nixon resigned.
He didn't, you know, he wasn't thrown out.
He resigned because he had a sense of honor.
Instead, we have Barack Obama, the president, getting up and making speeches saying this is the most qualified person.
And it's so damning.
It's damning of him.
It's damning of their party.
It's damning of the media.
And it's damning of the country.
It's damning of the country that somebody can be shown to lie and lie and lie and still stand before a cheering crowd as a candidate for president of the United States.
You know, nobody here is going to defend Donald Trump's dishonesty, but Donald Trump has been dishonest with his business.
Hillary Clinton has been dishonest with our business, and that is far, far worse.
The fact that Comey's speech did not immediately destroy her is a condemnation, really, of the entire country where we are.
Mary Sue Characters00:02:05
All right, time for the mailbag.
Yay!
Okay, the mailbag.
We start.
We got a video question.
You know, we're very excited.
I think this is our first video question.
It is from Warrior Woman and Warrior Friend, I guess.
Two video questions.
Let's hear what they have to ask.
Hi, I'm Kelly, and I'm Teresa.
My question is, how do you think that directors like Peter Jackson go from such tremendous highs with Lord of the Rings to such disastrous and categorical lows with movies like The Hobbit?
And my question is, do you believe that the female lead in Star Wars Rogue One is going to be a Mary Sue to appease feminists?
Okay.
The first question about Peter Jackson, the answer is pretty self-evident.
The way you can find out the answer is by watching any director's cut and then watching the original cut.
The director's cut is almost universally, almost inevitably worse.
When the director is allowed to do what he wants without commercial considerations, without storytelling considerations, he makes a worse film.
Peter Jackson started out, he made a terrific, terrific little movie called Heavenly Creatures about a true crime that happened.
He then went on to make Lord of the Rings.
When he made Lord of the Rings, the studio said to him, none of these movies can go over a certain length.
And he cut and cut and cut them to get them under that certain length.
I think it was three hours.
Each one had to be three hours long.
And that's what made those pictures great.
He was reined in.
He had to be, he was edited by the studio.
He's released it since with the added material, and it's boring and it's long and it's overdone.
Once he was that successful, nobody could tell him what to do.
Nobody could stop him.
And that's why his movies became just utterly endless.
I mean, if you watch King Kong, King Kong is a fascinating film.
He did the Naomi Watts, King Kong.
If you cut 15 seconds to a minute out of each scene of King Kong, it's a brilliant movie.
But each scene is too long.
And those are the tough decisions that people make.
And artists unfortunately don't make them unless they have someone standing over them, forcing them to make them.
Tough Moral Decisions00:06:02
I have my wife.
Most directors have a studio.
When the studio loses control of a director, they always do that.
As to the question of a Mary Sue, to me, a Mary Sue, for those who don't know, is a character who is just practically perfect in every way.
It's like, you know, the character who's just too good, too smart, too clever, and solves everybody's problems.
Will they have a Mary Sue in the next Star Wars movie?
That was the accusation against the last Star Wars movie that the girl in that was a Mary Sue.
My feeling is that all female heroines are Mary Sue's at this point, to be perfectly honest with you.
The minute they start fighting and beating up men and not, you know, punching men, then the man goes flying across the room.
I just think like, you know, that's not what women do, and it's not where their superpowers are.
You know, like, I'm perfectly happy to follow a female heroine if I can at least relate to her.
Plus, it doesn't help women, you know, because the funny thing about women is women look at Barbie and think like, oh, my, I don't have a nice body.
Men look at Superman and think, yeah, I'm just like that.
You know, the insecurity, the insecurity comes from within, you know, so I don't think it helps.
But I, you know, I really think that Mary Sius are an actual problem with all heroines in superhero movies, especially.
All right, from Casey.
Hey, Andrew, thanks for hosting an awesome podcast.
It is my pleasure.
My question, as a Christian, how would you explain to an atheist that moral relativism is not true?
Is there such a thing as an absolute truth?
And when you say absolute truth, you mean absolute moral truth.
It says, thanks, P.S. I listened to your show Before Ben's to get me in a good mood before having my heart torn to bits by the chainsaw of reality.
What I love about that is if Shapiro heard that, he'd laugh.
You know, yeah, Torres Arthur.
All right.
Moral relativism, great question.
One of the big, big issues of our time, one of the big problems.
If you ask almost any college student, they will tell you that nothing is what Hamlet said when he was pretending to be crazy.
Nothing is either good or bad.
The thinking makes it so.
It's just our culture that gives us morals.
They are not absolute.
Moral truth is what's called an axiom.
In math, you have axioms.
Those are things that can't be proved, but you can't prove anything else without them.
So I believe a classic mathematical axiom is if A plus B equals C, then I don't even know.
No, if A plus B equals C, then B plus A equals C. That's an axiom.
It's obvious, it's self-evident.
That's why they wrote, you know, Thomas Jefferson wrote, we hold these truths to be self-evident.
But you can't prove it.
You can't prove it to be true.
So the question each person has to ask himself in his heart.
The Nazis tortured children.
They just cut them to pieces while the children were alive.
People have given beggars bread out of their own food.
They've shared their food with beggars.
The question you have to ask yourself is, is one of those worse, morally worse than the other?
Take the most extreme, the most extreme situation, because it's true at the center.
Does it matter whether you marry one wife or two wives?
It's arguable.
That's arguable.
That can be in a culture.
But is it worse to torture a child to death morally than it is to give a beggar bread?
That's the extreme issue.
If you think that it is worse, if you think that it is worse even in a world that is populated solely by Nazis, you have the axiom of moral truth.
And once you get there, God, you cannot get away from God.
See, most people don't think this through.
They think they can have morals.
They think it's what's good for humanity, but they don't ask themselves, why should you do what's good for humanity?
They think, well, it's the most useful thing and the most reasonable thing, but why should you do the most reasonable thing instead of the thing that benefits you?
You know, there's always another step to moral logic.
If you think that the most extreme evil is evil all the time, and by the way, all people think this.
All people think this.
If they tell you they don't think it, they are lying.
The people who say, oh no, a Nazi torturing a child is just the same as a priest giving a beggar bread.
It's just a question of where you're brought up.
It's just a question of how you're raised.
It's just a question of your culture.
Anyone who says that to you is lying.
He knows it in his heart.
And so once you have that axiom, once you have the axiom, just like mathematics, you can build the rest of the moral system on it.
That's how I became a Christian, by the way, as you can read in my book, The Great Good Thing.
But that was the only leap of faith I took was that I was not willing to say, as the Marquis de Saud would have said, yeah, those things are the same.
Those things are morally the same.
And it's just a question of culture.
It's not.
We all know it's not.
It's just a question of getting people to admit it.
All right, from David.
Ben doesn't like Mathis' haircut.
What's your opinion on the best kind of haircut?
First of all, I can have no opinion.
That's like asking a bachelor about married life.
I can have no opinion about haircuts.
I will say this.
I will say this.
When I heard that Mathis had gotten a haircut, I geared up to give him holy L.
I thought this is going to be so much fun.
And he got this peaky blinder's haircut.
You know, if you see Peaky Blinders, where he shaves the sides close and then he gets this big thing on top.
But I have to say, I thought it looked rather becoming on him.
So I went easy on him.
So you knew Ben was going to go for his throat because that says, I kill him.
I was like, back, back, Ben.
But I thought it was pretty good.
So I think any haircut that suits your face, you should just get down on your knees and thank heaven that you have any hair whatsoever.
All right.
Should we take one more?
Yeah, we're kind of running out of time, but here's, what's your favorite Bible verse?
I get asked this a lot.
This is from Michael.
Hi, Andrew.
What's your favorite Bible verse?
The one that I really, that always pops into my mind, it's really silly because there's so many beautiful verses in the Bible.
So much of our language comes out of the Bible.
But the one verse that always comes to my mind, and I know Sean Hannity uses it all the time, is from John 14, 27.
Peace I leave with you.
This is Jesus speaking.
He says, my peace I give to you.
Peace I Give To You00:03:54
Not as the world gives do I give to you.
Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
And then afterwards, he endorsed Donald Trump.
Oh, wait, that was Hannity.
All right.
Listen, there's something else I want to talk about today that happened over the weekend, the July 4th weekend, and it plays into stuff I like.
Over the July 4th weekend, there was a Twitter hashtag, America Was Never Great, obviously a response to Trump's slogan, make America great again.
America was never great.
And normally I don't respond to these things, as I said on my blog.
When I step in dog crap, I don't have a debate with it.
I just scrape it off my shoe and keep on walking.
But in this case, I felt that this summarizes what the left basically thinks, and it's something that hit its high watermark when Barack Obama said he was going to fundamentally transform our country.
Because a lot of us were thinking, like, really?
You're going to fundamentally transform the freest, richest, safest, you know, most powerful country on earth.
Thanks, Barack.
You know, great.
That's really great.
Could you go away now, please?
But this is what the left has been selling.
You know, they have this book, The Howard Zinn History of America, that they sell to people that is just basically our sins.
We killed the Indians, we enslaved the blacks.
We did this, we did that.
We started the war.
We dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
It's our fault that we weren't nice to the communists.
All this stuff.
And this is based on this idea that the communists came up with, basically, that once communism failed, once we saw that it inevitably, whether it's communism or Bernie Sanders socialism, it leads to slavery and chaos.
We see it happening in Venezuela now.
They found, they figured out, well, then we won't criticize, we won't attack socialism, we won't judge socialism.
We'll just attack everything else.
They call it critical theory, but that's a little bit unfair to critical theory, which started out as a philosophical thing.
But the idea is they just criticize.
They just say, oh, you did this, you did that.
And my question to you is this.
What would your life be like if you looked at it that way?
If you looked at the time you failed as a parent or you failed as a child, as a son or daughter, if you looked at the times you lied or were cruel or snapped at somebody, you know, obviously your life would look pretty bad.
But then if you look at your achievements, you suddenly say, oh, well, I did do this, I did do that, I raised wonderful children, I did, you know, take my mother out on Mother's Day, I did all these wonderful things.
That's how a culture ultimately is judged.
I mean, nobody would look at Germany, which did terrible things in the 20th century, which was just the sort of source of a lot of the horror in the 20th century and not say, oh, you know, Germany was a great country.
What made the Holocaust so horrible was the greatness of Germany and that it was a civilized country.
America has done more for the cause of freedom than any country really since maybe England, maybe Greece.
You know, I mean, it's been a long, but it's certainly right up there.
When America started, there were no other non-monarchical republics in the world, whereas now every country that wants any kind of legitimacy has to call itself a republic, even North Korea, which is a hellhole.
They call themselves, oh, we're the Republic of North Korea.
That's because of us.
The Bill of Rights, the things that were put into law in the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, these things were codified in a way they never had been before, and they changed the world.
There's not one country on earth, not one free country, that doesn't owe a debt of gratitude to the United States of America.
We defeated Nazism.
We defeated communism.
We showed the way that capitalism can bring people out of poverty.
It really, this country has been an astoundingly great country, an astoundingly great country.
No question, no question that the resettling of the continent, which was going to happen anyway the minute somebody civilized and with guns showed up.
No question that there were bad things that happened with the Indians.
There were bad things that the Indians did to whites.
And no question that slavery was a great evil.
But, but you cannot judge a country by the bad thing it does, bad things it does.
And that brings me to the stuff I like, which is, this is my gift to you.
Why Read Flashman?00:01:20
If you have never read the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, they are a series of comic adventure novels about a coward, a coward who is accidentally involved in every great battle of the 19th century, and they are history told as it really is.
Now, here, let me just read to you before we end.
Here's Flashman.
He's this terrible coward.
He's in a club, and somebody starts talking about how mean the Yankees, the Americans have been to the Indians, how mean they've been to the Indians.
But of course, since he's been in every battle, he's been in the Indian wars, both as an Indian and as a white man.
He has been both because he's in every possible battle.
And Flashman blows up and he says, Now, see here, you mealy little pimp, he says to this guy, I've had just about a belly full of your pious hypocritical maundering.
If you think the whites were a whit more guilty than your darling Redskins, you're an even bigger bloody fool than you look.
What bleeding breastbeaters like you can't comprehend is that when selfish, frightened men, in other words, any men, red or white, civilized or savage, come face to face in the middle of a wilderness that both of them want, then war breaks out and the weaker goes under.
And it's just that kind of wisdom applied to the entire history of the 19th century.
It is an antidote to political correctness.
The Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, you will love them to death.