Ep. 174 dissects Trump’s ISIS speech, praising its Reagan-esque ideological framing but mocking "extreme vetting" as hollow, while contrasting Obama’s Iraq withdrawal with Trump’s proposed Middle East coalition. The episode spirals into anti-globalist conspiracy theories, accusing Soros of orchestrating refugee schemes and invoking anti-Semitic tropes before pivoting to a Capra-esque defense of "hard" patriotism—arguing America’s ideals, not its people, are exceptional. Clavin ends by insisting freedom’s legacy will outlast corruption, leaving Trump’s policies as both bold and untested. [Automatically generated summary]
As election 2016 degenerates from clownish buffoonery masking tragic depths of dysfunction to even more clownish buffoonery masking even more deeply tragic, deeper depths of even more dysfunction, many people have begun asking some very important questions.
Where can I catch the next bus back to the 1950s?
Will socialism come to America or can we just go to Venezuela and starve to death there?
And after you've called someone a conservative, globalist, cosmopolitan, deep state neocon, have you run out of synonyms for Jew?
But perhaps the question troubling voters the most is, have journalists in the mainstream media become such corrupt, mendacious Democrat hacks determined to deceive and hoodwink the public by replacing the honest truth with a wholly delusional narrative that they have sanitized Hillary Clinton's obvious criminality while depriving Donald Trump of a fair chance to get his message out?
Or is Trump just kind of a schmo?
Trump says it's the fault of the press.
He told the Daily Wire, quote, I have been totally victimized by a corrupt news media that has given me billions of dollars worth of free coverage so everyone can see what a total blockhead I am.
I haven't spent any money on advertising, so if the crooked media had simply not covered me, then no one would know what I was like and I would win by a landslide.
So much of what the media reports is utterly and completely untrue, like saying that Ted Cruz's father helped assassinate President Kennedy.
What sort of total idiot would believe nonsense like that?
But suddenly when it comes to me, they start telling the truth, which makes me look like some sort of total idiot.
It's just not fair, unquote.
Hillary Clinton was interviewed about media fairness by ABC's chief political correspondent, George Stephanopoulos, who peppered her with tough questions, including, are you comfortable, my darling?
Can I get you anything?
Is that coffee too cold?
Would you like me to make you another cup?
And, can't we end this farce and simply declare our love to the world?
Mrs. Clinton's answers were, yes, yes, a little, okay, and quiet, you passionate fool, Huma will hear you.
Though not necessarily in that order.
Stephanopoulos did finally ask Mrs. Clinton about the rumors that her health is failing.
Mrs. Clinton answered by falling down a flight of stairs, coughing up a bloody hairball, and then spasming uncontrollably for several minutes, after which she responded, quote, don't be ridiculous.
I'm as wheat-field as an electric blanket under cosmic tinker toys.
The incident was reported in the New York Times, a former newspaper, under the headline, sexist Republicans claim a woman is not strong enough to be president while she's suffering from a massive brain tumor.
But whether the news media are corrupt and Donald Trump is a buffoon, or whether Donald Trump is a buffoon and it's the news media that's corrupt, there are some things that are certain.
Donald Trump is a buffoon and the news media are corrupt, and Hillary Clinton is a flaming crapstick.
So the election continues on its usual course.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, that's day one without cracking up in my own monok.
You know, by the way, we've been hearing some complaints besides your complaints like, you're an idiot, you know, all these things, you're a terrible person where you spell your Y-O-U-R.
Stop doing this.
Y-O-U apostrophe-R-E if you're going to insult me.
I insist on proper grammar.
But we have been hearing your complaints about the sound quality, and we are working around the clock on the something about my mellifluous, velvety voice doesn't always travel, and possibly the fact that I move around a lot makes the microphone not as effective as it should be.
But we do hear you, and we are – you may not hear us, but we hear you.
And we are working on it.
Okay.
So we're on Facebook for 15 minutes.
Enjoy it while you can, and then it will be snatched away from you.
And you have to come to the Daily Wire to hear the rest.
Or you can get us on iTunes or SoundCloud.
And you must subscribe because tomorrow is Mailbag Day.
It's mailbag day, and you cannot be in the mailbag if you don't subscribe.
It's a lousy eight bucks a month.
What are you waiting for?
I mean, how cheap are you, really?
Okay.
All right, so Donald Trump, who you may remember from our last show, we actually didn't talk about Donald Trump yesterday all that much, which was such a relief, I don't know.
But he took some time out between periods of sticking his foot in his mouth and tripping over his tongue and falling over himself.
He took some time out to make what I thought was a very fine speech about fighting ISIS.
I mean, I would give it an A-minus, and I am a tough grader.
So, I mean, it's not to say it's an A-minus doesn't mean that I'm taking anything away from it.
Obama's Fault?00:15:04
I thought it had some flaws in it, as his philosophy has some flaws in it.
But it was really strong stuff.
And he started out, the thing that I really liked about it is he started out right away and framed this as a war of ideas.
He started out by saying in the 20th century, the United States defeated fascism, Nazism, and communism.
Now a different threat challenges our world, radical Islamic terrorism.
And he went on to talk about the way Ronald Reagan posed the Cold War, the fight with the Soviet Union, as a fight of ideologies.
And if you remember, back in those days, that was just as untenable to the media and the left as it is to talk about radical Islam.
When Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union is an evil empire, the press went nuts.
He was a warmonger, he was an idiot, he was a buffoon, he was a jingoist patriot.
So now Trump harkens back to those days.
Play number one.
In winning the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan repeatedly touted the superiority of freedom over communism and called the USSR the evil empire.
Yet when President Obama delivered his address in Cairo, no such moral courage could be found or would be found.
Instead of condemning the oppression of women and gays in many Muslim nations and the systematic violations of human rights or the financing of global terrorism, President Obama tried to draw an equivalency between our human rights record, and remember this: our human rights and theirs.
The records are unbelievable and unmistakable.
His naive words were followed by even more naive actions.
The failure to establish a new status of forces agreement in Iraq and the election-driven timetable for withdrawal surrendered our gains in that country and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
Fact-check true, all true.
Trump is always at his best when he's diagnosing the problem.
He's always at his best when he's calling out people for the mistakes they've made, always weaker when he starts to propose his own programs, especially when it gets down to details, especially when he gets into that I alone can solve nonsense.
I mean, this is a complex problem.
To fight a war that is a war, that is an ideological war, but is not against a nation state, is a very, very difficult thing to do.
This is a poison that reaches out into our country, that reaches out through computer screens, it reaches out through ideas, through YouTube, and captures people.
And, you know, President Obama falsely calls these lone wolf attackers.
They're not lone wolf attackers.
They're people who have caught this disease.
You know, an idea is like a disease, sometimes for good or ill, you know, sometimes for good.
A good idea can make people healthier and spread around the world, spread to people.
The idea of freedom, remember when America started, it was the only republic on earth.
And now, you know, everybody, even if you're a bad country, you have to call yourself a republic.
That's because of the success of the United States of America.
That's a good idea spreading.
The bad idea is Islam, and Trump is absolutely right.
He's absolutely right in his diagnosis of what Obama did wrong.
He left out the fact that Obama sat around while Syria went up in flames, drawing his red line that he never drew.
I didn't draw the red line, but I draw a red line, but I don't draw a red line.
That kind of stuff.
He left that out, but that's okay.
He really did get it.
So then he goes on and he talks about his opposition to the Iraq war.
And this is, it's political nonsense, but I would say it's the kind of nonsense we expect from our politicians.
The Iraq war is now unpopular.
Trump did at one point say that he thought this was a waste of time.
It was for nothing.
It obviously was not for nothing.
It obviously had a point and purpose.
Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible human being.
He was doing terrible things.
He was funding terrorism in the region.
The question of whether he had weapons of mass destruction, I mean, we know he had some weapons of mass destruction, but it does seem that he didn't have the program that people thought he might have been developing when he continually kept inspectors out.
But he did continually keep inspectors out, parading himself.
Not a bad thing that Donald, Donald Trump, not a bad thing that Saddam Hussein is gone.
But the war, I feel, was just badly run.
That George W. Bush, because of his loyalties to his staff, let them go on before he had that surge.
And when he finally stood up for his own vision of the thing and had the surge, he won the war.
That's what he's talking about.
That is what Obama, when Obama didn't negotiate a status of forces agreement, that's what Trump is talking about.
Obama let that victory go.
And whether or not we should have been in the war, and we certainly should have financed the war, which we didn't.
We allowed the war to just tack itself on to the debt.
Whether we should have gone in that war, the war was won when Obama took office.
No Americans were being killed the month before he took office, and he just abandoned that territory.
And there's just no question about that.
So Trump is right.
Okay, so now he phrases this thing as a battle of ideas.
And now he puts forward a sort of, I won't call it a specific plan, but an idea of a coalition fight.
And he sort of takes back, he reframes, we'll say, his opposition to NATO and his criticism of NATO by saying NATO has essentially responded to it.
We cannot always choose our friends, but we can never fail to recognize our enemies.
As President, I will call for an international conference focused on this goal.
We will work side by side with our friends in the Middle East, including our greatest ally, Israel.
We will partner with King Abdullah of Jordan and the President of Egypt, President Sisi, and all others who recognize this ideology of death that must be extinguished.
We will also work very closely with NATO on this new mission.
I had previously said that NATO was obsolete because it failed to deal adequately with terrorism.
Since my comments, they have changed their policy and now have a new division focused on terror threats.
Very good.
Very, very good.
I always love those Trumpisms.
Very good, very good.
Now, again, I just want you to notice, though, that he talked about, he talked about working with moderate Muslim states and moderate Muslim people, once again, framing this as a war of ideas, which unquestionably is what it is.
And compare that to what Obama was doing yesterday.
Yesterday, the U.S. transferred 15 Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United Arab Emirates on the largest such movement of prisoners yet in President Barack Obama's push to remove most prisoners from the offshore prison before he leaves office in January.
So this is this place we have on our territory offshore, basically in Cuba, offshore U.S. territory, where we can house these monsters without putting them back into the system, without putting them back on the battlefield, without giving them over to Muslim states.
Obama is obsessed with emptying this thing out because he said he would do it.
He wants to do everything that he said he would do.
It doesn't matter to him, just like he surged in Afghanistan for no reason, just as he got our troops killed in Afghanistan for absolutely no benefit.
He is living in this fantasy.
We'll try to get back to his ideology in a moment, but he does not understand, because of his own ideology, he does not understand that he is opposing an ideology.
And he doesn't know what ideology he's opposing because he's thinking he's playing a different game.
He's playing a game of chess.
You know, they say, oh, he's so smart.
He's playing 16-dimensional chess.
He is, but he's playing it by himself.
And he doesn't know who's on the other side of those 16 dimensions.
So this is the thing about Trump that I really liked about this speech.
It was all about ideas.
It was not about demonizing persons.
It was not about playing to that section of Trump's base that wants to hear the rage, that wants to hear the hatred, that wants to hear, you know, these guys are awful.
We've got to do something about this.
You know, he actually was phrasing it in terms of ideas, even when he got to the part that made all the headlines, which is about immigration.
Because this is his crowd-pleasing stuff.
This is the stuff people want to hear.
We're not going to have Syrians being dumped on us.
We're not going to have, I mean, after all, this crisis in Syria is Obama's fault to some degree, or at least his responsibility, to have all these people who have been shipped into Germany who are now molesting their women, to have them all shipped in here without any kind of vetting procedure.
You know, that's not fair.
They do vet them, but without proper vetting procedures, and why so many and how can we accommodate them without ever thinking about those questions?
So Trump gets to this, but again, he puts it in terms of ideas, and this is what got all the headlines.
In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test.
The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.
I call it extreme vetting.
I call it extreme, extreme vetting.
Our country has enough problems.
We don't need more.
And these are problems like we've never had before.
In addition to screening out all members of the sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes toward our country or its principles.
or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.
Those who do not believe in our Constitution or who support bigotry and hatred will not be admitted for immigration into our country.
Okay, we're going to vet this in just a second.
We have to say goodbye to our friends at Facebook.
So bring on the dancing girls.
Now all the fun begins, but you can hear the rest of the Daily Wire.
Tally-ho.
The foxes are running once again.
All right, so look, it's easy to say Trump says we've got extreme vetting, extreme, extreme.
call it extreme vetting it's extreme.
It's extreme and it's vetting, it's vetting and it's extreme.
I don't know why does he do that?
I guess because he's not that articulate and he just thinks repeating something emphasizes it again and again.
But he's extreme, extreme vetting.
It's going to be vetting.
It's going to be extreme.
So that's where we're going with this.
The people will not be allowed to come into the country unless they swear allegiance to the country and show that they're not in favor of Sharia law.
Now, it's easy to say.
It's easy to say, and even people on the right were saying, look, anybody can game a system like that.
Anybody can come in and say, you know, we saw the father of the Orlando shooter going around saying, oh, yes, I love America and I wanted my son to be fighting for the army and not for ISIS and all this stuff.
Meanwhile, supporting the Taliban.
It's easy to lie like that, especially if you come from a culture that approves of lying to the infidel, which is what Islam basically believes in.
However, however, it is also true that we have stopped promoting our values as values.
And whenever you hear words like our way of life or, you know, the things we love or who we are, that's Obama's favorite phrase, that's not who we are.
I just call BS on that because we stand, you know what?
We're not any better than anybody else.
We are not any better than anybody else.
We're not better than the Saudis.
We're not better than the Iranians.
We're just people, but we live under a certain set of beliefs and our ideas are better than other people's.
And those ideas guide us in our actions and our actions then become better.
As people, we're greedy, we're foolish, we're stupid, we're lustful, we're all the things that people are.
Americans, Iranians, all those things, they're all those same things.
Our ideas are better and our ideas are based around, circle around the center, central idea of independence, individual freedom, individuals making up their own minds, and therefore limited government, a government that is there to support your rights and defend your rights and really for no other reason.
Those are the ideas, those are the ideas the left have sold out.
Those are the ideas the left oppose.
And those are the ideas that make us, in Obama's phrase, who we are.
And so when he says that, when Trump says that, he is right.
He is right.
Everybody who comes into this country should be forced to swear allegiance to those ideas, should be forced to say, understand those ideas, take classes in those ideas.
Obviously, if you get citizenship, you have to.
And Islam, Muslim people should too.
As far as bringing in Syrian refugees, I don't understand why we're not doing what we did with the Kurds, basically, in the first Iraq wars.
We built refugee camps for them there.
Build refugee camps for them there and defend them there and keep them there so that they can repopulate the country after the Civil War is over and after the tyranny is gone.
But we don't do this.
And by the way, you know, I just want to address, I want to address this, there's a kind of conspiracy theory going around about globalism.
And a lot of this, as I was joking in the open, is a mask for anti-Semitism.
You know, Jews have always, first, you know, the first thing you do with Jews is you exclude them, and then you hate them for not loving you.
You know, you say, like, you can't be part of our society.
Why aren't you loyal to our society?
I mean, that is the problem with exclusion, is it creates radicals?
You wonder why the Jews signed on to communism in the Soviet Union.
It's because they were despised.
They were excluded.
You know, people, you create radicals when you exclude them.
Yesterday we were talking about the riots in Milwaukee and why blacks are completely confused about where their real dangers lie and who is really victimizing them.
But blacks were excluded from this country and from the main systems of this country.
And you always have to remember when you're talking about those people, when you're laughing about the guy who says, oh, the rich people have money and they're not giving it to us.
Always remember you're talking about the weakest among us, the most ignorant among us.
And that's not really funny.
That's something that we have to deal with as well.
We do have to work with people like that.
One World, Sinister Guy00:03:48
So, you know, there was this leaked memo, I think this is from the Daily Caller, from George Soros' Open Society Foundation, basically arguing that, oh, you know, this refugee crisis is a great thing.
It's the new normal, and it has made us effective in bringing on global governance because it's destroying borders and all this stuff.
And this is the stuff that the one-world deep state people love.
They love this.
You know, this really gets their conspiracy juices going.
Thing always bothers me about conspiracy people.
I always want to know, why do you know about this conspiracy and I don't?
Why do you know about it and nobody else?
What is the secret?
And then they think to themselves, well, Donald Trump isn't part of this conspiracy.
I mean, Donald Trump, who is in the ultimate insider, isn't somehow part of this conspiracy.
But it does make emotional sense.
It makes emotional sense.
George Soros is a sinister guy.
It is amazing to me that the left has managed to demonize the Koch brothers who openly advocate, donate money, and advocate for free capitalism, for free markets, and for capitalism.
And they're kind of libertarian, and they've demonized them, while George Soros actually is this spider weaving this web, donating to all these organizations that try to put secretaries of state into states so that they can count the votes improperly, that try to manipulate governments across government lines, try to manipulate the refugee crisis to his benefit.
He really is this sinister kind of guy who has this one idea of one world.
And what is that one world?
The one world, it's run by people like him.
He is a narcissist who sits in his, you know, in his money bag like Scrooge McDuck.
He sits in his room on his piles of gold thinking, I'm so rich, I must know better than everybody else.
And Donald Trump does emotionally represent the voice of the people, even if that voice is inarticulate, even if it's sometimes stupid, even if it's sometimes wrong, because the people can be wrong, the tyranny of the majority is a real thing, even if it's sometimes wrong.
He does represent those feelings.
And the Jew hatred part of this is just, I mean, it's just the devil at work, as Jewish hatred always is.
You know, Brett Stevens wrote an excellent column today about this Israeli Judo guy who won the bronze medal, and on the way to winning the bronze medal, he defeated the Egyptian, or Sassan, his name is.
And he defeated the Egyptian, and the Egyptian wouldn't shake his hand.
And this is after the report of the Lebanese team that wouldn't let the Israeli team on the bus to the Olympics and all this stuff.
And Stevens writes about an essay by the great historian Paul Johnson in which he talks about what happens to nations that expel their Jews.
He says, Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Degree of 1492.
The effect was to deprive Spain and its colonies of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.
In Tsarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.
Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn't sent Albert Einstein, Leo Silzard, Enrico Fermé, and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S., the greatest atomic scientists of that era.
These patterns were replicated in the Arab world.
Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel.
There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, 41, 45.
Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace.
They chased all the Jews out of these countries, and today there is no great university in the Arab world, no serious indigenous scientific base, a stunted literary culture.
In 2015, the U.S. Patent Office reported 3,804 patents from Israel, 3,804 patents from Israel, compared with 364 from Saudi Arabia and even fewer from all the other countries.
Two Kinds of Sentimentality00:02:33
So just remember when you're talking about, oh, you global cosmopolitan conservative, the problem is always ideas.
Soros is a man of bad ideas.
He is a man with bad ideas.
The problem is not the fact that he's Jewish and some other guy is Jewish and not Jewish.
You know, that's the stuff that is just deception.
And that's what we've been talking about in the Stuff I Like section.
We've been talking about one of my favorite directors, Frank Capra, who is always accused of being sentimental.
And yesterday we talked about his great movie about love.
It happened one night.
Today we're going to talk about his great movie about patriotism.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
And I was trying to, I'm not sure how clearly I put it, I was trying to get to an idea of sentimentality, which is the misuse of emotion.
Because we need our emotions to guide us.
You know, Keats said, beauty is truth, truth, beauty.
We need all of the most important things in life are self-evident truths.
They're axiomatic.
There is no way to prove them.
We have to know them.
And that is a kind of emotion.
And so how do we keep our emotions from going off?
I think there are two kinds of sentimentality.
I think there's soft sentimentality and there's hard sentimentality.
I think soft sentimentality is kind of the feminine sentimentality.
Hard sentimentality is the masculine sentimentality.
If I had to choose them, I think that that's how it would come down.
Soft sentimentality emphasizes, frequently overemphasizes the best in humankind.
It talks about love as a generality.
It talks about, you know, sacrifice as a generality.
It talks about, you know, these are the kinds of people who say, well, Jesus was kind to the strangers, so shouldn't we destroy our borders and let everybody die?
You know, that's the kind of, that's soft sentimentality.
Hard sentimentality, which is kind of what men do, is elevating the things that need to be done above the reasons you do those things.
So that's when you hear people saying, yeah, yeah, let's go kill those Muslims.
Let's go kill those Muslims.
We don't kill Muslims because we like it, pal.
We kill Muslims when we have to in order to maintain our freedom.
We only kill when we have to to maintain our freedom.
You know, no one respects the military more than me, no one respects the police more than me, but the police and the military are not the object of the exercise.
They are there to protect the object of the exercise, which is your family, your business, your scientific creation, your arts, all the things that make human beings human.
And so when you elevate those things to the purpose of a country, when you become, as they used to joke about Prussia, that it was not a country with a military, it was a military with a country, that's when you lose your freedoms then too.
Protecting What Matters00:04:26
So Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Why is this such a great movie?
You know, I saw this movie first in college.
So we're talking about Berkeley, right, the University of California at Berkeley in the early 70s.
You want to talk about the darkness at the heart of darkness, no patriotism whatsoever.
This picture starts and people are howling at the screen.
I mean, I'm in a class on film and they're playing this and I've seen the movie and I love it.
So I'm sitting there enjoying the movie.
People are howling at the screen.
By the end of this picture, people were in tears and were cheering.
They were cheering.
These early 70s, Berkeley students were cheering the United States of America through Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
Why?
Why was this sentimental picture so effective?
And I would like to argue it's because of its honesty.
Okay, it's the story of essentially, Jimmy Stewart plays essentially a Boy Scout master in an unnamed state who, through a series of events, gets appointed senator.
And he comes to Washington as the most idealistic, open-eyed, silly, sentimental patriot in the world.
He thinks that Abe Lincoln is still president.
He thinks the words on the Lincoln Memorial are still in effect.
He thinks the old Constitution is what everybody lives by, these ideals.
And what he finds out is this country is insanely corrupt.
It is run by a big machine.
The machine is called the Taylor Machine.
But it's basically this machine politics that controls everything through graft.
And he alone stands up for this stuff and fights for it.
And it shows you a country.
The reason the picture works is because it shows you a country that is utterly corrupt.
It says no good things about America.
It only supports the ideals and the ideas of America through the Jimmy Stewart character, who, by the way, is elevated to nobility, but is in fact kind of a fool.
You know, he's an innocent fool.
He's the innocent.
Let's call him an innocent, not a fool.
So the famous end of this, you know, many of you have seen it.
I won't give too much away, but in the end, he's battling alone against a graft project, a project to build a dam.
And he gives a filibuster.
He takes over the Senate and he gives a filibustering speech in which he reminds these thoroughly corrupt, an entirely corrupt, and indifferent and apathetic body.
So they're just like they are today, same people there today, with this one Boy Scout.
He's literally a Boy Scout.
That's what he is, arguing against this graft project in favor of using this area for kids.
And here's part of that speech where he tells people to go up and look through the eyes of the statue on top of the Capitol Dome.
Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol Dome.
That lady that stands for liberty.
Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something.
And you won't just see scenery.
You'll see the whole parade of what man's carved out for himself after centuries of fighting.
And fighting for something better than just jungle.
And so he can stand on his own two feet free and decent, like he was created.
No matter what his race, color, or creed.
That's what you say.
There's no place out there for graft or greed or lies or compromise with human liberties.
And if that's what the grown-ups have done with this world that was given to them, then we better get those boys can started fast and see what the kids can do.
And it's not too late.
Because this country is bigger than the Taylors or you or me or anything else.
It's bigger because of its ideas.
You know, honest patriotism is idealism about ideals and realism about reality.
And it's about fighting for the first in the face of the second.
And that's why when people ask me why I don't get depressed by, you know, an election in which Donald Trump is fighting with Hillary Clinton, this bozo fighting this gangster, basically, you know, it's because it's always been like this.
We are no better as people than anybody else.
Our ideas are better.
It's the ideas we're fighting for.
The ideas will not die.
Trust me on this.
The country may go.
I hope not.
But the ideas will still be here and there'll still be something to fight for.