Andrew Clavin recounts his experience at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he contrasts Donald Trump’s transactional leadership—highlighted by a tone-deaf Apprentice joke and leaked foreign policy gaffes like calling Mexico’s cartels "very strong"—with Barry Black’s soul-stirring sermon on faith, rooted in 1 Peter 1:18–19. He defends Trump’s policy wins while critiquing his moral misalignment with Christian values, noting resistance to repealing the Johnson Amendment despite Mike Johnson’s push for term limits and free clergy speech. The episode mocks left-wing "professional anarchists" funded by Soros, who violently disrupted campuses like UC Berkeley, framing their opposition as hollow compared to the Tea Party’s unified conservative movement, before closing with a satirical jab at modern disillusionment. [Automatically generated summary]
According to news reports, Democrats are planning to hold seminars for Democrat candidates on how to talk to real Americans.
I'm not making that up.
These seminars will attempt to teach Democrats to stop speaking Democrat and start speaking real American in the hopes that they will make Democrat policies sound as if they were real American policies and thus cause real Americans to mistake Democrats for real Americans and vote for them.
As Democrat seminar leader Shay Ivanovich Mohamed told reporters, quote, if we can't convince real Americans to vote for us, then we won't be able to fundamentally transform America into something else.
And that's un-American.
Maybe it's American.
Sometimes I get those two confused, unquote.
The Daily Wire has managed to obtain or invent a prospective syllabus for the Democrat seminars, listing the topics with a brief description of each class.
Among the topics to be discussed will be guns, what are they, and how can we ban them.
The syllabus says, quote, many Americans have come to feel that the Constitution's Second Amendment protection of the right to bear arms should be interpreted as a protection of their right to bear arms.
When talking to real Americans, Democrats should carefully explain how dangerous guns are by showing how every time they are in the hands of Islamic terrorists, they go off and kill someone.
If the real Americans tell Democrats that we should ban Islamic terrorists instead of banning guns, Democrats should explain to the real Americans that they are making the Statue of Liberty cry because that's not who we are.
Hopefully, this will convince the real Americans to be who we are instead of being real Americans, unquote.
Another seminar listed on the Democrat syllabus is The Constitution.
Is it a living document?
And if so, how can we kill it?
The syllabus says, quote, many real Americans feel a great affection for the Constitution as a document that ensures their freedoms.
Democrats should carefully explain to real Americans that the Constitution was written so long ago that the paper has become all brown and crinkly and no one can read what it says.
If real Americans continue to insist on following the Constitution, Democrats should explain that it was written by white men who owned slaves and wore wigs, sometimes at the same time.
And it would clearly be much more fun to get our laws from screaming women who dress up as vaginas, unquote.
Other seminars on how Democrats can talk to real Americans include how to drop your G's and call people folks as if you were some idiot from the Midwest, how to break it to people of faith that there is no God, and how to convince a patriot his country really stinks.
Seminars will be open to anyone who can present evidence that he's a Democrat and not a real American.
Conservatives and Upheaval on the Left00:15:25
But I repeat myself.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is ippitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, I am back from our nation's capital where I was swanning around with the president and the vice president.
And the king of Jordan was there as well, and me, who is the king of my own imagination.
A lot of royalty was in the room.
I'm incredibly jet-lagged.
I have to tell you this, if I lose some words along the way, that's why.
I came back fairly late last night and I thought to myself, you know, I really want to go up and watch the Fox panel so I just know what they're talking about before I come in.
But I hate to fall asleep in front of the television set.
But I thought, I'll just go up and try and watch it.
So I sit down, I instantly fall asleep, and I wake up and there's a gigantic Ben Shapiro face in front of me.
I guess he was on Fox last night and I have this huge TV and it was like, oh my God.
I thought it was a nightmare, but I was actually awake.
But I'm going to talk about the, I'm going to talk about my experience at the National Prayer Breakfast, which was quite, quite an experience.
Really got some fresh insights into a lot of stuff.
But I'm going to talk about that in a little while.
So if you're on Facebook or YouTube, you will have to come over to thedailywire.com where you can listen to it or if you just spend a lousy eight bucks a month, you can subscribe, watch the whole show at the Daily Wire.
You don't have to bounce around.
First, I want to talk about something else that's going on, and it was going on while I was gone and is still going on, which is this upheaval on the left, on the streets, which is, of course, funded and paid for by guys like George Soros.
These are, as Donald Trump tweeted this morning, these are professional anarchists and paid protesters, but they are tapping into something that has already been going on at universities, where of course we know from watching Ben try and go and speak at universities that they already have shut down the American commitment to free speech.
And, you know, the idea, this is kind of a three-tier attack.
What's happening, it happens on the streets, it happens in the press, it happens in the political arena, and it's kind of interesting to watch the way these guys are flowing together.
You know, even, and it is, you know, people are, it's, you know, conservatives are people who can follow any change to disaster in their imaginations.
That's who conservatives are.
Conservatives are people who see a change and think that's the end of the world.
Now it's over.
Oh my God, something's different.
Everything's good.
That's why they're conservatives.
That's their natural instinct.
So I know people who are looking at this, staunch conservatives, and saying, oh, these guys, they can't win by voting, so they're going to win by just destroying the country.
It's going to be a revolution.
And this is, you know, this terrible thing.
And even a guy like Michael Savage, who is really out there on the right, is suddenly urging Trump to not move so fast and not do so many controversial things, which that just strikes me as backing off.
I mean, it reminds me of an old Jules Pfeiffer cartoon about feminists.
This is way, way back in the 70s or something.
It was in the Village Voice, and he had a cartoon of a woman screaming, I want, I want, I want.
And then suddenly everything was dumped on her, and she said, I don't want it.
And that's what it reminds me.
These conservatives have been screaming, we've got to change things.
And now Trump has come along and he's changing things very quickly.
And suddenly they're going, stop, stop, you know.
So anyway, this obviously happened in Berkeley, but it also happened outside NYU where Gavin McGinnis tried to speak.
I think this is yesterday, last night.
And you know Gavin McGinnis, he's basically a comedian, a performance artist.
He's really funny.
He does a lot of anti-feminist stuff.
And they, of course, they had to turn out to disturb, to stop this.
And an NYU professor, because I don't, you know, the thing about Berkeley, they kept saying these are outside agitators.
And I'm sure that's largely true.
I'm sure there's a lot of that going on.
But this is an NYU college professor.
I don't have her name, but she does look like that Melissa, was it Click who was, you know, yeah.
But anyway, she is screaming at the police, telling them to beat up the people coming to see Gavin McGinnis.
This is her idea of fighting fascism, is telling the police to beat up people she disagrees with.
Listen to this.
Why are you here?
You're not here to protect these students from the Nazis.
No, you're not.
This is completely fed up.
And these students had to face them on your own.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
You should be standing up to those Nazis.
You should be protecting these students from hate!
This is hate!
These are fing assholes!
This is a joke!
You're protecting the Nazis!
It's a fing joke!
You are a joke!
You're drowned, boys!
You're prone, boys!
I'm a professor!
I'll dare you!
I'll dare you!
I mean, come on!
So this is where these people are.
This is their mindset, that this is fighting fascism, is to have the police beat up people you disagree with, which of course is fascism.
I mean, Gavin McGinnis, you know, he's just there to entertain.
And the reason they're so upset at Gavin and Milo is because Gavin and Milo are them.
You know, Gavin and Milo are both kind of left-wing people who feel the culture, who understand how to troll people, who understand how to do this, and that's why they hate him.
And here's CNN reporting.
And listen carefully to the way they report the protest.
Now, these protests in the street, people dressed in black with masks on are beating up Trump supporters with staff.
One maced a Trump supporter.
Others are carrying rods and beating people with them.
Okay, that's what's happening in the streets of Berkeley, California, where the free speech movement was born.
Ha ha ha.
Now, okay, and this is CNN reporting.
There was a warning from the police, a verbal warning, saying to get out of this square.
And as we're backing up here, this is something clearly that they've got to get a handle on.
What is that actually burning?
It looks like something with a door on it.
It's a light.
It's a street light.
The kind of lights you see when there's a major event that the city pulls out.
So it's a large light that was tipped over and now has been set on fire.
UC Berkeley police now have announced over Twitter that the speaker.
UC Berkeley police have announced over Twitter that the speaker who was scheduled to speak tonight on campus has left the campus and is no longer there.
Clearly, they are hoping to try to diffuse this as much as possible and get people to kind of move on.
Does not look, I mean, Kyung, correct me if I'm wrong, does it look to you as if people are clearing out in response to the police?
Oh no.
Oh no.
So the police didn't really do very much to stop this going, you know, going on.
They didn't, you know, they let this go on.
Same thing happened at Gavin McGinnis' speech.
He was maced as he was walking up on stage and ultimately the crowd got so rowdy he had to stop.
And you know, CNN at one point referred to Milo as, I think the phrase they used was he was an extreme right-wing conservative.
I mean, you know, like Bernie Sanders is an extreme left-wing liberal, you know?
I mean, it's like he was an extreme right-wing conservative, extremist, conservative right-winger, you know?
It's like they're justifying.
Here's New York Times reporter Malini Ramaire.
She works for the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper.
You may remember it, some of you.
It's called How Violence Undermined the Berkeley Protests.
So it's like violence is some guy.
You know, some guy named Violence showed up.
It's like the commercial where the girl has diarrhea and her diarrhea is played by another woman.
It's like violence showed up and disrupted the protests.
So here she says, I saw someone wearing all black walk up to a student wearing a suit and say, you look like a Nazi.
The student was confused, but before he could reply, the black clad person pepper sprayed him and hit him on the back with a rod.
This is taking place in America, by the way, just we're clear about this.
I ran after the student.
I ran after the reporter says, I ran after the student who was attacked to get his name and more information.
He told me that he is a Syrian Muslim.
Before I could find out more, he fled, fearing another attack.
Amid the chaos came word the event had been canceled.
It was clear early on that the majority of violent protesters most likely were not from the campus.
Still, in the aftermath, I heard people say that peaceful demonstrations would not have succeeded in preventing Mr. Yiannopoulos from speaking.
So was violence appropriate, she asks.
A Trump supporter was hurt.
A Syrian Muslim student was hurt.
Does either of those statements seem more outrageous than the other?
I mean, this is, you know, was violence appropriate to stop Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking?
So here is Milo speaking out.
I want to get cut number three here.
But it turns out that the progressive left, the social justice left, the feminist Black Lives Matter, antifa left, the hard left, which has become so utterly antithetical to free speech in the last few years, is taking a turn post-Trump's election where they simply will not allow any speaker on campus, even somebody as silly and harmless and gay as me, to have their voice heard.
They won't allow students to listen to differing points of view.
They're absolutely petrified by alternative visions of how the world ought to look and people with arguments and facts and reason that don't conform to the crazy social justice left vision of the universe.
So I was evacuated by my security detail and by the police tonight from UC Berkeley.
UC Berkeley, of course, being the home of the free speech movement.
It's both ironic and sad that this campus appears to be no friend to free speech anymore.
And this, you know, I've talked about Milo before.
I actually admire his talent a lot, and I respect his intelligence, and I respect what he's trying to do.
He's trying to take the fact that he's gay, and he had the dangerous faggot tour and all this stuff.
He really knows exactly, he knows exactly where to get him.
You know, he's an icon of what the left thinks the left should look like, and he's a Trump supporting right-winger.
And I have talked about the fact that I think sometimes he has justified evil in justifying kind of that section of the alt-right, which has now become a meaningless phrase, meaning anybody the media dislikes.
But he has occasionally justified the white supremacists as being kind of trolls, as being ironic.
The anti-Semitism is just ironic.
They're just trying to say things.
But there is this place where you cross over from irony into evil, and evil will always trump irony.
That's the thing.
You can always be sort of saying, oh, yes, I was just being ironic when I beat that man to death.
It was just a comment on our times.
It was kind of performance art, you know.
However, however, I think one of the things that you will notice, by the way, with the Trump administration is now they're in power, all that alt-right stuff has gone away.
And Milo was on Breitbart writing that he was against white supremacy, that that was not the way to go, that's not what he was looking for.
And I think that once they rode into power, they understood everyone around Trump, not everyone around Trump, but so many people in his family are married to Jews or sleeping with Jews or have converted to Judaism.
This is not an anti-Semitic administration.
It's not a racist administration, I don't think, at all.
But that, of course, is always the left's go-to phrase.
So they find the people in the crowd who are racist.
And it is possible, and I think it is true, that Milo may have gone down that road a little bit, and I think he's realized that now.
However, he still has a right to speak and do his routine.
And basically, his routine is against political correctness.
We have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
Come over to TheDailyWire.com, and I'll be talking about my experience at the National Prayer Breakfast, watching the Donald, President the Donald, and the Vice President.
Okay, so what's the point of all this, right?
This is paid violence, but of course it doesn't matter unless, one, they overthrow the government through violence, which I don't think is going to happen.
Our government is fairly secure, and we on the right have all the guns.
So if they keep hitting people with the sticks, it's not a good idea, you know?
I mean, after a while, you're hitting the wrong group with sticks.
But listen to Tim Kaine speaking, former, he ran for something, didn't he?
I can't remember what it was, something, yeah, I don't know.
He was some babe and him, I can't remember.
But anyway, here's Tim Kaine talking about how he wants to see people resisting, this is their word, the resistance against Donald Trump.
I saw that Howard Dween Dean tweeted at me the other day, Tim, the base is getting ahead of the leaders.
That's exactly backward.
We are so excited that the American public is energized to speak out against the abuses of this administration.
Democratic senators led health care rally, Save Our Healthcare, on Martin Luther King Day in about 75 cities around the country, including Richmond.
Tens of thousands of people rallied to save our health care.
Then the women's march that was organized at a grassroots label.
Then people coming out and protested these orders.
So the way we get outside the bubble is we take advantage of this tremendous public outcry against the administration.
What we've got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box.
And now there's the momentum to be able to do this.
And we're not afraid of the popular outcry.
We're energized by it.
And that's going to help us do our job and do it better.
This guy is like the reincarnation of Alvin the Chipmunk.
I can never watch him without thinking about Alvin.
Anyway, we're going to fight in the streets.
And we're energized.
We're energized by these guys dressed in black beating people up.
They're trying to push the politicians to the left.
Somebody, I think it was Sinclair Lewis.
I'm quoting from memory, but he said, when fascism comes to America, it's going to come carrying a Bible and wrapped in a flag.
You know, I think he got it exactly wrong.
I think it's going to come carrying social justice and wrapped up in Karl Marx because that's the easier way to slip into fascism.
It's not that right-wingery can't slip into fascism.
It can, but I think it's just as easy, and if not more easy, when, remember, for all these years, they've defined anyone who disagrees with them as hate.
It's easy to say that hate should be beaten up.
It's easy for that professor to see why the police should be beating up people who want to come see somebody speak.
So here's Rachel Maddow trying to take this movement and turn it into a left-wing Tea Party, right?
Tea Party vs. Anti-Trump Protesters00:03:40
Because the Tea Party was extremely successful in replacing establishment conservative Republicans with real conservatives, with people who came back to the real conservative roots of the Republican Party.
And so here's Rachel Maddow taking some picture of some very pleasant-looking, nice, kind of ordinary Americans who are supporting this left-wingery and basically saying this is the new Tea Party movement.
In 2010, at the height of the Tea Party's power, the proportion of Americans who said they supported or leaned towards supporting the Tea Party was 39%.
Right now, the number of Americans who say they support or lean towards supporting the women's marches is 60%.
And again, that poll was taken in 2010, right before the Tea Party was credited with sweeping the nation in the midterm elections of November 2010, which brought Republicans to power in an unprecedented way.
So, I mean, if you compare the people in the Tea Party, the Tea Partyers in the Statue of Liberty Crowns back in 2010 with the anti-Trump protesters now in the Statue of Liberty Crowns.
Americans, broadly speaking, are equally aware of those two movements.
But Americans like the one on the right a lot more.
Not the one on the ideological right, the one on the right side of your screen.
A big, solid majority of America approves of the women's marches that happened in protest of Donald Trump.
Yeah, in a pig's eye.
But let me quote, you know, this is, and Marcos Militas, who's quoted in a Kim Strassel column, and I want to get back to that in a minute because it's a great column.
He says, the Tea Party didn't really become a force until it started ousting Republicans that didn't feel represented them.
Democrats either need to feed, nurture, and aggressively champion the resistance, or they need to get out of the way in favor of someone who will.
And if you're reading the New York Times, if you're reading, if you're watching CNN, you can just see they're writing about these violent, violent protests as if there's some justification there, but it's not the real heart of the movement.
You know, this is communists always do this.
You know, yeah, we locked up some people, but that's not the heart of the movement.
Yeah, we starved 10 million people to death, but that's not the heart.
You know, the heart of the movement is justice.
If you're justice, it's all about justice.
So here's Kim Strassel saying why this is not going to work.
She says the Tea Party erupted for a lot of reasons, but a big one was frustration with Washington business.
As usual, activists in the Maine weren't demanding the Republican Party become something new or ultra-right wing.
They were demanding the party simply hold true to its stated long-time principles of free markets and limited governments.
A few Senate missteps aside, activists targeted much of their fire on reliably conservative or gettable House districts inhabited by lazy incumbents who cared mostly about staying in office.
The Democrats' problem, this is Kim Strassel talking, the Democrats' problem is that all their reliably liberal states and districts are already occupied with good liberals who take orders.
This is the problem.
The Republicans were not living up to the Republican ideal that Democrats already are.
Those in the firing line, she goes on to say, are instead Democrats in red states.
Mr. Trump won, up for reelection next year.
They've got to collaborate.
They've got to cooperate with the Republicans in some things, or else they're going to be dumped.
They are the only reason Democrats remain within reach of Senate power.
The left's Tea Party is threatening to make them pay for cooperation with Republicans by fielding ultra-left-wing primary candidates.
So you're seeing the left caught between two strategies.
One strategy is to govern and to try and cooperate when they can, which is the old strategy.
And the other is to go to 11, as they now say, on every single issue.
Religion and Speech Performance00:07:39
And this screaming, as I've said before, if you just keep screaming all the time, eventually you become silent.
You just become a noise in the background and nobody's going to pay attention.
I do not believe that this, you know, even the riots of the 60s, remember, they produced Richard Nixon.
They didn't win anything in the political sphere at all.
They may have transformed the culture, but they didn't do anything in the political sphere.
And these guys aren't even going to transform the culture because they are against everything that is good and true and real.
And every day, something happens that proves that Donald Trump, and I'm going to talk about Trump in a minute, that shows that Donald Trump is at least addressing the real world where they weren't doing it.
So let me talk about the prayer breakfast.
I really have to talk about this because it genuinely was a thrill to be there.
I really had a good time.
I met George W. Bush when Laura Bush invited me to her book thing, her writer program.
And when Obama got elected, I thought, gee, I'll never be invited anywhere near Washington again.
And so I was quite surprised to find myself there.
My wife said a really funny thing to me this morning.
We have coffee in the morning together and we try to chat for 15 minutes before the day begins.
And I came home late, so I didn't really get to tell her about the experience.
And I was describing all these wonderful people.
People came from all over the world, but a lot of most of the people were from all over the country.
And these are just people of faith who gather together every year at this event and have a lot of workshops and things where they talk about their faith and how their faith operates in their life and all this stuff.
And I was describing them and I was obviously describing them with a great deal of admiration and affection.
And my wife turned to me and said, you know, you've always liked regular people.
I thought that's very funny because it's obviously true.
I've always have liked regular people, but it also implies that I'm not a regular person myself.
And that is also true because I'm an artist.
I mean, I live, I literally live in Hollywood.
You know, I talk to artists.
I think about artistic things.
That's the world that I live in, but I've always, but unlike a lot of artists who only like other artists, I have very few friends who are actual artists, but I've always really liked the people.
I like to go to these things and meet these things.
And the atmosphere at this place was so uplifting.
Without getting sentimental about it, I'm not being sentimental, but it was the whole idea of this is that Democrats and Republicans get together to talk about prayer, and they do this every week.
People who are far-left Democrats and people who are far-right Republicans get together every week.
Congressmen do it on one day, and senators do it on another day, and they do Bible study, and they do prayer.
And as one guy said, it's tough to stab a guy in the back after you've prayed with him, but not impossible.
But this is, you know, and that atmosphere, you know, this is true of just about everybody who comes close to government.
It's really easy to hate politicians when you're far away from them.
When you sit down with them, many, many, many of them, I would even say a majority, are actually earnest people trying to do the best they can for the country.
And that doesn't mean they're smart.
That doesn't mean they're good.
It doesn't mean they're nice or anything like that.
But most of them are trying to do their job.
And to see them united in faith and to understand that the Bible matters to them and Christianity matters to them and their faith matters to them, you know, it's encouraging.
It means that at least they're discussing the things that really matter.
And the first thing I did was I went to this Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist.
He invited me to this thing, this media fellowship dinner, where a lot of media bigwigs and regular people get together in a room, and this was the largest one they ever had.
And people speak, you know, about their experience with faith.
And it's supposed to be an off-the-record thing.
Because, you know, when you talk about faith, you're always, you know, people cry a lot when they talk about God.
I've noticed this, and this is true of me too.
It's very hard to talk about your experience with God without getting sentimental and choked up because God touches you where you live.
I mean, not to make a pun, he touches you at the springs of your life.
And even when it's just some small thing, in those moments when you realize that the king of the universe actually knows your name and cares about you, it's very moving.
It's a very moving thing.
So they're supposed to be off the record, even though there are a lot of big media types in the room.
So the first speaker was the vice president, Mike Pence.
And because I'm a speaker, I'm sitting at the first table, and I'm literally, I must have been five feet away from the guy.
He just comes in.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
I'm like, look, I'm impressed by these things.
I'd much rather, I'm an admirer of Mike Pence.
And he gave a very lovely speech.
His wife and daughter were there, and he gave a good speech about this.
But the thing about Pence that I really like, all politicians are fake in one sense, that if you have to give speeches all the time, ultimately speeches become a kind of performance piece.
You can't give a speech all the time without understanding how to perform and how to do these things so that people care about them.
So Pence is very good at playing sincere.
He's very good at acting out his sincerity and his faith and his down-to-earth Americanism and all this stuff.
But at the same time, I think he's actually acting out something that he is.
I think he actually has a lot of sincerity and faith.
And I'd be surprised to find him in a seraglio with like opium pipes and things like that.
I think he really is what he pretends to be.
And I think that's ultimately all you can ask of a politician.
He gave a good speech.
And I talked about, I talked about my own experiences, but I also talked about something that is really important to me, which I call the narrative, and how this cloud, this cloud, prevents people from seeing things as they really are.
And I talked about the fact that religion is covered in the press.
You only see a pastor on the news when he opposes something.
That's all you ever see.
They never bring a pastor on to ask him about positive things that people are doing to ask them.
They never cover this, the prayer breakfast.
They don't cover the prayer breakfast.
They don't cover the fact that there are prayer breakfasts every week in Washington.
They never cover this stuff.
And it's only, you know, like, how do you feel about gay marriage?
I'm against it.
You know, so that the ultimate atmosphere that comes off is that all pastors are small-minded, finger-wagging guys who are just against things.
They oppose things.
They're telling you what not to do.
And that is, of course, the attitude most of us have toward religion.
And it's all untrue.
I mean, Christianity, it may be true of some religious people.
I can't say it's not true of some religious people.
But Christianity itself is the religion of yes.
I think St. Paul says that somewhere.
I can't remember the quote, but it's the religion of yes.
It's not the religion of no.
And, you know, in Hollywood, they cut God out of things.
So God, Jesus saves Johnny Cash, and they make the biopic of Johnny Cash.
And there's one scene that is, it must have been 10 seconds long, where he's reluctant to walk into a church, but he does.
And that was it.
That was all the mention of that.
The story unbroken of the Olympic runner who was tortured by the Japanese, brought to Christ by Billy Graham.
The last third of that book, which had me like sobbing continuously from beginning to end, the last third of the book is all about that.
And it's just nothing in the movie.
And I don't know if I've talked about this on air before, but when I wrote my Homelander series for young adults, it has a Christian hero in it.
And sometimes he talks about the Bible.
When the British edition came back, they sent it back to me with all the Bible references cut out.
They sent the manuscript back to me with all the Bible references cut out.
And I said, you can't do that.
You bought the book.
You cannot edit the book.
The book was edited in America.
And they said, well, we have to, because the biggest bookseller, Waterstones, and I'd like to mention them by name, Waterstones, will not carry a lot of copies of the book if it mentions the Bible in it.
And I said, you know, if the guy were Jewish or Muslim and you said this to me, you would understand what you're saying.
Bible References Cut Out00:03:20
You would understand what you're telling me to do.
I will not do it.
Five times, five times, the publisher came back to me asking me to do it.
Are you sure?
Will you not?
You're going to ruin the sales of the book.
I said, you know, I can't.
I just, I wouldn't do it.
If you took a Jewish character and said he couldn't talk about his Judaism, I wouldn't do it then either.
And they finally had to do it.
They finally had to publish it as I wanted it published.
And Waterstones did exactly what they said.
They cut the sales of the book.
So the series just didn't do what it would have done if I had acceded to it.
And that's because this narrative is the thing that they want to sell.
And I just talked about that and tried to tell my story in terms of breaking through the narrative.
All right, now the prayer breakfast.
And I want to, and you know, this is another thing about this.
By the way, this is, you know, Donald Trump spoke at a prayer breakfast.
And as a novelist, one of my jobs is to understand my characters, no matter who they are or what they do.
And you can't understand anybody unless you love them.
You cannot understand anybody unless you see what is beautiful about them, because that's the part God made.
The rest is stuff that's been corrupted by the world, the flesh, and the devil.
And so that is really how you come to understand people.
And this is true in regular life.
And I had this moment with Donald Trump, you know, where I suddenly kind of got a look at him.
And you've heard me, I've been really honest about how I feel, and I'm going to talk about some of his shortcomings right now.
But I had this real sense of sympathy for the guy.
You know, we come into this prayer breakfast, and the whole thing, you know, it's a big room, and I wasn't in the back of it, but I was far away from the main table.
But there you are in this room with the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state.
It's a little heady, you know, and I'm sitting next to a new congressman, Mike Johnson, his name was.
He's the new guy from Louisiana, very, very smart guy, very sophisticated, you know, constitutional lawyer, who told me, by the way, for some more encouragement, that the Congress is trying to keep up with Trump.
He said to me, We're working 18 hours a day.
And I said, wait a minute, congressmen are working 18 hours a day.
And he said, yeah, because we were so dispirited by Obama that we stopped working because we knew he wouldn't sign anything that we would do.
But we believe Trump will sign things.
So they're working very hard.
He said one thing they were working on is getting rid of, and Trump mentioned this in his speech, is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment, which forbids preachers or anyone with a tax exemption from backing any specific candidate without losing his taxes exemption.
And this has hobbled ministers in the doing of their job, of this hobbled them in speaking politically.
Now, I don't want to go to church and hear what candidate my minister is backing, but I already know, so I think the guy should be able to say what it is he thinks about an election in terms of his faith.
And you can disagree with him or not, but certainly he should not in any way be silent.
So that's a good thing.
He said, we're also working on term limits, but we'll never get it past the old guys in the Senate because they don't want to let go of their power.
And he said, even if we give them a grandfather exemption, they won't do it.
But he said they're working on, and anyway, the general atmosphere is very positive, very uplifting, very bipartisan.
And the senators, for instance, would get up and pray in pairs.
So a Republican and a Democrat would pray, would kind of pass off their prayers together, same as the congressman.
Barry Black's Impact00:14:48
And then the keynote speaker gets up.
And the keynote speaker is the Senate pastor, Barry Black.
And this guy was a rear admiral.
You know, so this is a guy.
This is the real deal.
This is a real guy.
And he got up and he gave a sermon.
This is a highly intelligent, highly literate guy, but he used that literacy and gave a sermon out of a black Baptist church.
And I could feel, you know, I'm a student, obviously, of texts, and I could tell within two minutes where he was going because he started out very quiet, very humorously.
By the end of this thing, he had built this thing up where people were on their feet.
I mean, he transformed a room full of $1,000 a minute attorneys from Washington into this black Baptist church.
And all of us were.
I mean, this guy is amazing.
I mean, he's amazing.
Let me just play a one-cut of his speech where he was talking about the fact that he grew up in Baltimore, in the inner cities of Baltimore, and his mom would pay him a nickel for every Bible text that he learned.
So he learned all the short texts.
He said he would go through the Bible trying to find all the shortest texts so he could earn his nickel.
This is the second cut, the one in Austin, that you cut for me.
And my mother knew what she was doing.
One day I memorized 1 Peter 1:18 and 19.
I was only 10 years of age.
It says, and we are redeemed not with corruptible things such as silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
And even at 10, I had sufficient analytical skills to know that the value of an object is based upon the price someone is willing to pay.
And when it dawned on me, little guy in the inner city, that God sent what John 3 calls in the Greek the monogenes, the only one of its kind, his only begotten son, to die for me.
No one was ever able to make me feel inferior again.
This is a guy who didn't shake hands with a white person until he was 16 years old talking about what God meant in his life.
Well, you can, I'm telling you, this guy rocked the room.
He rocked the room.
And people were just, you know, this is an all-American man.
This is what an American man looks like.
And he was just, and these are a room full of people of faith.
And you could just feel, as they say, one of the funny things is because I was born a Jew, because I live in Hollywood, I don't really speak Christianese.
So like I gave a speech about my conversion at this place, and everybody said, we loved your testimony.
It's your testimony.
You're testifying.
You're testifying.
And you know a word I would never use.
It's just a word I would never use.
And this room was, to use a term I would probably never use, was filled with the spirit.
You could feel it everywhere, okay?
A room of people, some of whom are cynical, some of whom are deeply immersed in the corrupt work of government.
Still, the room was filled by the spirit.
All right, that was the keynote speaker.
Now it's time to introduce the president.
And Mark Burnett gets up.
And Mark Burnett is the guy who produced The Survivor.
He produced The Apprentice, which was Trump's big show.
And then he went on to do this stuff about the Bible.
He did the Bible miniseries, which was such a huge hit.
So he has become a real force, especially in Christian Hollywood.
And what I have to say is nothing against him personally.
I don't know him personally.
I know many people who do know him personally, but I don't know him personally.
But he got up and gave this introduction that would have been appropriate at a Hollywood trade meeting or maybe a Hollywood audience meeting of people who wanted to get into Hollywood.
He gave this introduction about how he met Donald Trump.
And I think he's Australian.
I'm not sure.
I can never tell Australian English and New Zealand all kind of meld together for me, but I think he's Australian.
And he said, you know, and he said, he was a poor guy and he was motivated by Trump's art of the deal.
And he said, because he was motivated by art, I went on to do a little show called Survivor.
You know, I went on to do a little show, you know, kind of touting his own success.
And of course, there was nothing wrong with the speech.
It was just completely out of context.
I mean, one of the things any speaker has to do, and I don't speak that much, but when I do, you have to read your audience, right?
And this is an audience that has just, you got to understand, this has just been blown away by this guy's, by Barry Black's faith in Jesus Christ and his presentation of that faith.
Just the whole room is, and suddenly he's talking about the survivor and how he had a meeting.
And it was a good story.
He told a funny story about how he wanted to do a show about Donald Trump and he came up with this idea for the apprentice.
And he was coming in from the airport and he called Trump's office hoping to get an appointment.
And Trump himself came on the phone and said, come on over, come on over to Trump Tower.
So Burnett goes over to Trump Tower and he goes in and he's totally unready, but he pitches the apprentice to Donald Trump and Trump says, I like it.
Call my agent, set up a deal.
So Burnett leaves the office, goes back and calls Trump's agent.
And of course, Trump's agent is furious that he didn't go to the agent first, that he went directly to Donald Trump, even though he hadn't meant to do that.
And the agent says, I'll never let him do this.
I will never let him do the show.
I hate it.
I'll never let him do it.
So he goes back to Trump and he says to Trump, your agent says he hates it and he's not going to let him do it.
And Trump says, according to Mark Burnett, he says, look, I gave you my word, we are doing this.
And by the way, call the agent and tell her you're fired.
That's how he says he made the apprentice.
It's a great story.
It was a lovely, funny story.
But it was just completely out of context.
It was out of context.
And that was the context, in the context of that introduction, that Trump got up and made this joke about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Here it is.
They hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place.
And we know how that turned out.
The ratings went right down the tubes.
It's been a total disaster.
And Mark will never, ever bet against Trump again.
And I want to just pray for Arnold if we can for those ratings, okay?
And before I say my reaction to this, I want to just play Arnold's funny response.
Hey, Donald, I have a great idea.
Why don't we switch jobs?
You take over TV because he's such an expert in ratings, and I take over your job.
And then people can finally sleep comfortably again.
And Trump answers him with a tweet saying, you know, Arnold did a bad job as a governor, too.
He wasn't just bad on the apprentice.
They're fighting.
It's a Hollywood fight.
But I have to tell you, what I felt mostly was this sudden sympathy with Trump.
It was like, it was as if we were in some old British novel and the aristocracy was sitting around dining and in walked the self-made millionaire who didn't know which fork to use because it was just tone deafness.
Because these were people of faith gathered together to talk about prayer, not to talk about, and they weren't praying to Donald Trump.
He may not be a little confused about that.
But he didn't, and he just didn't have it in him to read the room.
And I've talked about this before, about how I think that the thing that disturbs so many conservatives about Trump is not what he's doing, because he's doing so well.
I think I think he's doing a great job so far, but that he is the first post-Christian president.
And by that, I don't mean to say he's not a Christian.
I have no idea.
I don't mean to say that he's not a man of faith.
I have no idea.
You know, that's in his heart.
That has nothing to do with anything that happens in the press.
What I mean by that is he does not pay lip service and tribute to the normal Christian values.
He bragged in one of his books about committing adultery.
He didn't admit it.
He didn't confess to it.
He bragged about it.
He said, I never pray for forgiveness.
I just try not to do anything that I need to be forgiven for.
I mean, this is a guy who has no clear concept of what the Christian world is.
And as somebody who comes to the Christian world from outside, you know, I kind of understand that when a room is filled with the spirit like that, you don't have to be pompous.
You know, Barry Black was hilariously funny.
He made some hilarious jokes.
It's not about being pompous.
It's just you've got to respect that this is a place that is not about you at all.
And he didn't have that in him.
He doesn't have that in his repertoire.
You know, it's not, I mean, somebody, he tried, by the way.
He was trying to speak in the kind of lowered tones.
He spoke about religious freedom.
He spoke about protecting religious freedom.
But when he made that joke, I could feel, you could feel the entire room kind of just cringe a little bit.
And he's the president.
Everybody wants to love him.
This is the thing.
I never met Barack Obama.
You know what I think about Barack Obama.
I thought he was an awful, awful president.
If I had met him, it still would have been meeting the president.
These guys put on their office like a robe.
And when you meet that office, you're meeting the entire country in some sense, good and bad, pro and con.
And so you want to love him.
You want to love the president.
And it was just, you know, it was just a little tough.
And this is the stuff that is happening when he talks to foreign leaders.
There is a way that this is done, and it's not being done.
So you heard, I'm sure, all this stuff that was leaked about his conversation with Australia.
And for a while, they were putting out that he threatened to invade Mexico, which was just a total lie.
What he said to the Mexican president was he said, you guys have some very tough ombres down there.
And if you need us to give you some help cleaning them up, we will come down and help you.
But you've got to clean them up, talking about the drug cartels.
So that's not a threat to invade Mexico.
And he got in a back and forth with the Australian president about this deal Obama made where we're supposed to take some of their Syrian refugees.
And he said, it's a dumb deal, you know, and they made it sound like he said, but this is the way.
And so he actually talked about this at the prayer breakfast, going off script.
Here's the second Trump on leaders.
And the world is under serious, serious threat in so many different ways.
And I've never seen it so much and so openly as since I took the position of president.
The world is in trouble, but we're going to straighten it out.
Okay?
That's what I do.
I fix things.
We're going to straighten it out.
Believe me, when you hear about the tough phone calls I'm having, don't worry about it.
Just don't worry about it.
They're tough.
We have to be tough.
It's time we're going to be a little tough, folks.
We're taken advantage of by every nation in the world virtually.
It's not going to happen anymore.
That's what I do.
I fix things.
That was the key thing.
And even when he was talking about this, by the way, he started talking about people being beheaded and people being drowned in cages and stuff like this, which all of which is absolutely true.
Again, it was just inappropriate.
It was just out of place.
You know, like that was not what people were there to talk about.
It was talking about people being beheaded and people being drowned in cages.
They were there in that moment.
They had been swept up into the spirit by this guy, Barry Black.
And, you know, the press was so unfair.
The press said, oh, and Trump insulted.
Some reports said he insulted Barry Black because he kind of paid him this New York compliment.
He said, I don't know if you're elected or appointed, but I'm reappointing you.
What the hell?
That's what he said.
Those were the words he said.
Oh, what a terrible interpretation.
That's a New York compliment.
I mean, look, everybody in this room in the Daily Wire knows what a New York compliment is because I'm here, right?
When I come in and say you're an idiot, it means I love you.
Unless I say it to J. Hey, when I say he's an idiot, I actually mean I'm just being literal in that case.
That's just descriptive.
But that's a New York compliment.
He was just paying him a New York compliment.
And a lot of this is about the way New Yorkers talked.
But it's still a question of what the president is.
And the president has always been not just a chief executive.
He's always been a moral leader.
He's a guy who represents us.
And this is a guy who represents some of the things about ourselves that we may not like.
He represents pop culture.
He is a Hollywood guy.
He's a Hollywood guy.
The guy who reminds me of more than anybody are guys like Joel Silver and Harvey Weinstein, who are kind of like out of control, but they do a great job.
Anyway, I just want to say that it is the difference between your pastor and your plumber.
That's the way Trump sees it.
Trump wants to be loved.
He wants you to love him, but he wants you to love him for fixing stuff.
If your plumber comes over and you disagree with him or he makes up a story that isn't true, you don't care if he makes the plumbing work, right?
That's what he sees.
That's what I do, folks.
I fix things, and that's who he thinks.
That's the way he wants to win your love, is by fixing things.
And he is not going to be the kind of moral leader we've expected.
And that's just something about us.
The fact that we elected him says something about us.
And if there's going to be Bible study, if there's going to be prayer, if this country is going to return to its spiritual roots, we're going to have to do it.
We're going to have to take control of that.
And maybe that's not a bad thing.
All right.
That was my impression of the prayer breakfast.
Like, I always like to end with music, stuff I like.
This is wonderful.
I just, my wife sent this to me.
Dustin and Genevieve Akuoy have an album out called Average Anthems, which is a take on satire of famous songs.
And this is their satire of the circle of life from the Lion King.
It's called The Virtual Life.
And if you can't hear, you know, in the back they had that African singing.
They imitate that with the repeated phrase, eating ramen here in my pajamas.
So it's brilliant.
Eating ramen here in my pajamas.
Anyway, here is Dustin and Genovive Akuai from their album Average Anthems Doing the Circle of Life.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The Clavenless Weekend is upon us.
I will see the survivors on Monday.
Time to segment social media to see who loves me on last tag bless life.
Time to post up with an inspirational quarter.
It's deep and we'll get loud.
No I fight.
Oh no, I'll die.
It gives me life.
Eating ramen here in my pajamas.
Meeting mom and here in my pajamas.
When Words Fail, We Speak Through Emojis00:01:01
Looking on to see all of my followers.
It's a grown up job on a saucer.
There's my mama rats and not Obama.
You know, caps and proper use of commons.
To be honest, asking for the homage.
They can't find a tweet of face for comments.
Every day we get on the internet and talk through our screens to everyone.
When words fail, we speak through emojis and memes.
We follow Tay Tay and Kim Kardashio.
When I'm not on flink and feeling bassy, and my FOMO leaves me with no chill.
I know my Snapchat squad will make me say I've got the World Wide Web is baby for real.