Andrew Clavin dissects the "deep state" as a $100B regulatory machine, framing Trump’s presidency as a cultural counterattack against leftist narratives—yet warns his inconsistencies (Russia, Israel) risk undermining his disruption. Milo Yiannopoulos’ viral gaffes expose free speech’s limits: while he dismantles political correctness, his unchecked provocations (e.g., 13-year-old remarks) lack principled alternatives, mirroring Trump’s need for strategic coherence. The episode pivots to Edison the Man, praising its mythic revivalism before urging a return to Western historical narratives amid leftist decline. [Automatically generated summary]
Recently, many of you may have heard journalists and commentators using the expression deep state.
You may have heard them say, the deep state is threatening our democracy, or the deep state is conspiring against the president, or help help, agents of the deep state are coming to, and then a high-pitched scream followed by a horrific gurgling noise and an ominous silence.
You may have found yourself asking, what is the deep state?
You may have then found yourself vanishing off the face of the earth, leaving nothing but a pair of eyeglasses, a gold tooth, and a trail of blood.
Well, today, I'd like to explain to you the meaning of the term, deep state.
The deep state is that group of influential people in bureaucratic agencies, intelligence services, and the military who tend to remain in positions of power no matter who gets elected.
The deep state is not a conspiracy in the sense of faceless evildoers gathering in secret locations to thwart any threat against their interests.
Most of them do have faces, although they like to hang back in the shadows, making their faces difficult to see.
Mostly, however, they simply go about the business of making regulations, gathering information, and arranging the mysterious deaths of anyone who opposes them.
Now, we all need government regulations and intelligence, but the deep state can get out of control.
During the Obama administration, for instance, there were so many new and restrictive regulations that they increased our energy and medical costs, hampered small businesses, reduced internet innovation, and ultimately cost taxpayers a stupendous $100 billion every year.
Here's how it works.
Let's say Congress constitutionally passes a clean water law making it illegal to dump toxic chemicals into public waterways.
The Environmental Protection Agency then issues a regulation declaring your toilet a public waterway and forbidding you to go to the bathroom for the rest of your life.
If you sue the EPA because you need to use the bathroom, the courts will cite the Chevron rule, which says only the EPA can decide if the EPA is violating the rules of the EPA.
If you say, wait, what?
That's crazy.
Then videos of your online sex with a 16-year-old girl named Starlight, who's really a 47-year-old fat man named Shlomo, will inexplicably turn up on HBO.
If you cancel your HBO in protest, you could then be fined $100,000 a day until the fine reaches $14 million or you disappear without a trace, whichever comes first.
Leftists and the media, but I repeat myself, tend to love the deep state because it empowers elites like themselves to outlaw the life choices of all those annoying we the people types in the flyover states.
Therefore, if a president comes into office who threatens to oppose the deep state, the deep state may retaliate by leaking his secrets to a compliant press who will then spin them into hysterical conspiracy theories, allowing intelligence agencies to tangle him in useless investigations.
Fortunately, I can tell you that that can't happen here.
I can't tell you that it can happen here because then I'd be killed.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Shipshaw dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hooray, hooray.
Artists Shaping Consciousness00:03:16
All right, well, this is probably the last Andrew Clavin shows.
Tomorrow, just my shoes will be left after I attack the deep state.
So here's what I want to talk about today.
I want to talk about, we were talking about yesterday, Trump's attack on the culture and how important I think that is and how I think he's really doing a good thing, even though there's sometimes this conflict between what he says and what he does.
I mean, yesterday was a great Trump day.
Trump had a terrific day, made a great appointment.
We'll talk about all that.
But whenever I go out, I very rarely go out and give speeches.
And the reason for that is I'm a writer.
I write at my desk.
If I have to leave my desk, it costs me time.
It costs me money.
It cost me production.
So I don't like to do it unless they pay me thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, which they never do for some reason.
But whenever I do go out and give a speech, especially if I'm giving a speech about the culture, I always begin it with three quotes.
And the quotes are these.
One is from Percy by Shelley, who was one of the great Romantic poets, the great British Romantic poets.
He wrote, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
So Shelley was writing when poetry was the best-selling form of fiction.
You know, if you wanted to be a famous person, you would probably write poetry.
Sir Walter Scott had best-selling poems.
Byron was the most famous literary figure of the time.
So he was saying poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
They write the laws, though nobody knows it.
Poets write the laws.
James Joyce was a novelist at the time when novelists were the best-selling form of fiction.
They were just giving way to the movies.
And he wrote a novel about a novelist, called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And at the end, the young man, Stephen Daedalus, has this revelation where he realizes he's going to go off and become a novelist.
And he says, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
And what he's saying is, as an artist, I go and I encounter reality and I turn it in the factory of my soul.
I turn it into the things that form my race's conscience and my race's consciousness.
So he again is saying that artists form people's consciousness.
And the final quote is a quote, I don't know where it comes from, but my friend Andrew Breitbart used to say it all the time.
He used to love to say, politics is downstream of culture.
Meaning that by the time you get into the voting booth, your mind has been shaped by a thousand pieces of information flowing into your head, art, the movies that you watch, the stories that you read, the stories that are being told, the sentiments that are expressed all around you.
And these become a form of thinking so powerful that you don't even know they've shaped you.
You don't even know they've shaped you.
The example I always give is George Washington, the father of American liberty, who could not understand why his slaves didn't work hard.
He couldn't understand why they would escape, why they would want to be free.
It took him a long time to figure that out because the narrative around him was so powerfully accepting of slavery that he couldn't see it.
And that's why I think what Donald Trump is doing is actually kind of history making and amazing and positive.
You know, there's politics.
I see everything in these two kind of catchment areas.
There's politics, so he can take, you know, this decision and that decision, say, yes, this is good, we like this, this is bad.
You know, he's going to do things.
I think he has certain left-wing tendencies.
He's probably going to do things I don't like.
Why They Resist Freedom00:14:06
And I'll say that, you know, I don't like that policy.
But what he's doing in the culture, weirdly enough, I think is the most important thing he has done so far.
That thing he did with that press conference, which he followed up with a speech in Florida, it changed everything.
It changed everything.
These guys were crawling all over him like the Lilliputians over Gulliver.
They were tying him down with nonsense about the Russian conspiracy.
And look, hey, later, if it turns out they get some facts about a Russian conspiracy, I'll say, hey, they had it.
They got the story.
But they don't have the story now, and that hasn't stopped them from running front-page stories, trying to imply that Trump is somehow indebted to the Russians, that he's somehow working with the Russians.
What is really happening when you look at what's really happening?
It is a very different story.
Before we get to today's news, the McAllister appointment and all this stuff, let's just go back and look at the speech that he made in Florida after this press conference, where he hammered this home, talking about the press and going directly to the people.
This is the first Trump cut.
The dishonest media, which has published one false story after another, with no sources, even though they pretend they have them, they make them up in many cases.
They just don't want to report the truth, and they've been calling us wrong now for two years.
They don't get it, but they're starting to get it.
I can tell you that.
They've become a big part of the problem.
They are part of the corrupt system.
Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, and many of our greatest presidents fought with the media and called them out, oftentimes, on their lies.
When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it.
I will do whatever I can that they don't get away with it.
They have their own agenda, and their agenda is not your agenda.
Now, I'm a First Amendment absolutist.
Short of crying fire in a crowded theater, I believe that everybody should be able to say anything.
There should be no restrictions on the press.
Don't forget, don't forget it was Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who wanted to shut down the press, who wanted to stop David Bossy from putting out his film against Hillary Clinton, who are complaining about spending.
Remember, money in the political arena is speech.
So Donald Trump has done exactly diddly nothing to restrict speech or spy on reporters, which Barack Obama also did.
He has done nothing to hold up FOIA Freedom of Information Act requests.
He may do that later, but he hasn't done it yet.
All he has done is struck back.
And that is revolutionary because he's a Republican and because you notice Congress is doing absolutely nothing.
Why?
Because they're so afraid of the press that they're hiding under the desks.
So the thing is, the thing is, this, of course, drives the press crazy because it's never happened to them before.
They've never gotten the slap they so richly deserve.
And I want to put in a cut, Reince Priebus and Chris Wallace going at each other because Chris Wallace is an honest guy.
He's an honest reporter.
He works for Fox News.
There's no way you can say he's part of the left-wing conspiracy.
But the media is so left-wing, it's so left-wing that even an honest man becomes a sort of tool of the dishonesty.
So here he is fighting with Reince Priebus as Priebus explains why they don't like the coverage.
But you get about 10% coverage on the fact that you had a very successful meeting with B.B. Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the U.K., the Prime Minister of Canada.
He covered all of those news conferences.
Everybody did.
Right, sure.
Yeah, for about, yeah, right.
But then as soon as it was over, the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies.
But you don't get to tell us what to do.
Nothing's happening.
You don't get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did.
Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time, but I got to say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people.
Let me tell you something.
He said a lot of things about Fox News, Chris.
I think you ought to go check the tape.
He blamed you for a lot of things.
And I'm surprised as someone from Fox, that you'd forget all the shots that he took.
No, he took the shots.
And we didn't like it.
And frankly, we don't like this either.
But he never went as far as President Trump has.
And that's what's concerning because it seems like he crosses a line when he talks about that we're an enemy of the people.
See, it's just not true.
Obama went far, far beyond that.
I didn't like the phrase enemy of the people either, although I think there's a certain amount of truth to it with our news media, but that I didn't like that line, but that doesn't matter.
I mean, Obama went so much further in subpoenaing phone records and trying to criminalize James Rosen's job, trying to say that he had committed, essentially, committed treason.
They were awful.
The Obama administration was awful.
All this guy has done is struck back.
And when Chris Wallace says, you don't get to tell us what to do, like a two-year-old child, that doesn't mean a thing.
Nobody's telling him what to do.
All he's telling him is what he has done.
All Priebus is saying is what you've done.
He's not saying what he has done, what he has to do.
He's saying what he's done.
Now, and let me show you why.
I just want to show you why this is so that the thing about the media is it's not this story, it's not that story, it's an entire atmosphere.
As Trump himself said, it's a tone, okay?
We've talked a lot about how all this stuff about all this nonsense about Russia, they forget about the fact that Barack Obama leaned over to the Russian president and told him to send a lesson, the outgoing Russian president told him to send a message to Vladimir Putin, the incoming Russian president, that after the final, his final election, Obama said, I'll have a lot more flexibility.
And he was referring to missile defenses to stopping the missile defenses from being arrayed in Europe, okay?
Serious, serious stuff.
I mean, I'm not calling it treason, but that was a serious, serious thing to do.
Nothing like the Trump administration has been found out to have done nothing anywhere close to this.
Here is MSNBC's Katie Tour, who is on Twitter all the time talking about how reporters are like firemen.
They run to a story like a fireman runs to the fire.
Here's Katie Torr interviewing Florida Congressman Francis Rooney.
And Rooney brings this up.
Listen to Katie's reaction.
You seem to have a lot of confidence, though, that he is going to treat Russia in as tough a way as his predecessors did.
I do.
And I think he'll treat it.
I'm just wondering where that confidence comes from.
I'm just wondering where that confidence comes from.
Well, he's got a lot of conservative people in the government.
And, you know, he's a business guy, so he might have spoken a little less nuanced than very trained generals and State Department leaders might.
But I think he knows that, as he said all through the campaign, we're going to keep America strong.
We're going to keep America safe, both at home and abroad.
And you can't do that without dealing with Russia.
He also has a number of people that were, at least in his administration until last week, who were friendly with Russia, General Mike Flynn being one of them.
His former campaign CEO was Paul Manafort, who's got ties to Russia.
His Secretary of State was given the Medal of Friendship by Russia.
So you say there's a lot of conservatives who are going to push back on Russia, but I see a lot of folks within Donald Trump's administration who have a friendlier view of Russia than maybe past administrations did.
Well, I think it was Obama that leaned over to Putin and said, I'll have a little more flexibility to give you what you want after the reelection.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you're referring to, Congressman.
She doesn't.
I mean, she could have said it was not Putin.
It was Medvedev.
But it was the former guy.
But he said to send the message to Putin.
He said, yes, I'll tell Vladimir I will pass this on to Vladimir that you will give over Europe to our clutches.
But I have no idea what you're talking about, Congressman.
That is the problem.
That's this thing, the Obama administration.
It was scandal-free.
It was scandal-free.
Hooray!
This is the problem.
And it's because the left, and that means the media, because the media is ensconced in its own narrative, they don't even know they're lying.
Even guys like Chris Wallace are defending a dishonest organ of information because he doesn't know.
They are stuck in the narrative.
And so, up until now, have we been stuck in the narrative?
And Trump has really started to shatter that.
I think it is a positive thing in and of itself.
With some of his appointments, with the judge, the pick for the Supreme Court, with his rearranging our relationships with Israel, I think it is a positive good in and of itself.
I'm going to talk about some of the dangers I think he's facing, but you got to come over to thedailywire.com and hear that if you're listening on Facebook or YouTube.
Also, I forgot to mention, tomorrow is Mailbag Day.
How could I forget to mention your problems are almost over.
All your troubles are almost over.
You can put your troubles in the old kit bag and smile, Brother Smile, because we will answer all your questions if you subscribe to thedailywire.com, a lousy eight bucks a month, and all your problems solved, cheap at the price, as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, now here is the problem with the Trump administration.
First, let's just talk briefly about McMasters.
To replace Michael Flynn, who went down in flames, he is appointed Lieutenant General H.R. McMasters, a guy basically universally acknowledged to be a terrific pick.
He was in Iraq.
He was in Afghanistan.
He won some tremendous tank battle in the first Gulf War, I believe it was.
Totally outnumbered, but he just out-strategized them.
He is famous for having developed the strategy that became the surge that George W. Bush heroically used to tame and finish the Iraq, to win the Iraq war before Obama lost it again.
And he wrote a famous book called Dereliction of Duty, which essentially charged the Vietnam-era military with not standing up enough to the civilian powers and letting themselves be lied to and dragged into a war without a real strategy.
So he's a guy who speaks up for himself.
You know, and this whole meme that the media's got that Stephen Bannon is running the country and all that stuff.
You know, Bannon, I don't think expects to or will try to tell guys like McMasters what to do or Mattis or anybody.
These are very strong-willed people.
And McMasters, well, let's just play the appointment.
This is the quick speech he gave after Trump appointed him.
I'd just like to say what a privilege it is to be able to continue serving our nation.
I'm grateful to you for that opportunity.
And I look forward to joining the national security team and doing everything I can to advance and protect the interests of the American people.
Thank you very much, sir.
You're going to do a great job.
Just another sterling pick by this president who everybody says is a dope, is an egotist.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
He's scrambling this chaos, but he keeps picking these great people.
And the one time he picked a guy who maybe didn't fit the bill, and Michael Flynn replaced him with a great pick.
I just want to play this one cut of McMasters because I was researching him and looking at it.
I found this cut of him.
He's giving a talk about the future of the military.
He's quoting Kant, the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, talking about the...
By the way, in my limited experience of dealing with the military, these guys are not that thin.
There are a lot of guys like this, these scholarly soldiers, you know, who really know what they're talking about and why they're doing what they're doing.
He talks about using people not as a means to an end, but people are the end.
See, this is what the left always gets wrong.
People are not here to develop a perfect world.
The world is here for people.
People are the purpose of everything.
And he talks about that, and he quotes John Stuart Mill, and he talks about what soldiers have to learn when they come into the military.
Just listen to what a humanist guy this is.
We make it clear to soldiers, if you treat civilian populations with anything but respect, you're working for your enemy.
So It's really clear that it's really important that soldiers understand how we use violence and what justifies violence.
And it's particularly important to have this kind of education because contrast that with what justifies violence in our society today, at least in popular media, in video games and in movies.
And typically it's the demonstration of individual prowess or the advancement of individual interest, right?
And so for our military, what justifies violence?
Well, it's a lawful mission.
and it's fighting for each other.
And so we have to make it clear what justifies violence.
And it's fundamentally different from oftentimes what young citizen volunteers come into the Army thinking.
So applied ethics education is important.
Ignorance, though, can also be about the people among whom these wars are fought.
And so it's important for us to train soldiers for combat against enemies, but also to understand the populations, the micro history of these areas, the social, the religious dynamics.
And so what we want to do in this education of soldiers is develop empathy.
Have them develop empathy for the people among whom these wars are fought.
So ignorance is one of the first causes of breakdown, and these are some of the things that we do to address that.
You know, I don't mean to get sentimental.
I hate it when people get sentimental about the military, especially, but I have to say it makes you proud that these are the guys who run our military.
I mean, the guys like this who are thinking in these humane and humanitarian ways about the mission that we send them off on.
We send them into these terrible, terrible situations to clean up the messes that our politicians make, to clean up the messes that the world makes.
Replacing Sentimentality With Value00:11:24
And you send in a guy like that, I think America is being incredibly well represented.
I think that's true, by the way, on the streets of our cities with a lot of our police officers.
Two of them, I think, were shot in L.A., I believe it was yesterday, may have been the day before.
And we send them out there, and the last president abandoned them, I feel, abandoned them to politics and to nonsense and to racism from the administration.
And I think we should just be really proud of these guys who represent us on the field of battle and in the battles that sometimes take place on our streets.
Here is the thing that we have to watch with the Trump administration and with Donald Trump himself.
When you take down the narrative, that is, I am saying, a positive good.
He is taking down the narrative.
That is a really, really startling thing.
I did not think I would live to see that happen.
And it does seem to be happening.
But you've got to replace it with something and you've got to replace it with something of value, okay?
So the narrative that comes out of the Trump administration has to be a narrative, an American narrative, the narrative of freedom, a narrative of individuality, a narrative of the rule of law, all these things that we have been fighting to preserve against this leftist onslaught that has taken over our country for just too long, not only in the Obama administration, but also through the Bush administration and its underlying assumptions.
I mean, those are the things that I think we're fighting for.
We're fighting to overturn those underlying assumptions.
We now have all these great people in this administration, and they're all saying one thing, and frequently, Trump says something different, okay?
So Trump keeps talking about how much he loves Putin.
Hey, you know, he's certainly right that if we can have a good relationship with this rogue government in Russia, you know, we sort of have to.
We have to have some kind of relationship with them.
But then Pence, you know, the vice president is over in Europe talking to the EU and talking to NATO.
And this is what he says about Russia, basically reassuring them that we are going to hold Russia responsible.
This is cut seven.
And with regard to Ukraine, we must hold Russia accountable and demand that they honor the Minsk agreements, beginning by de-escalating the violence in eastern Ukraine.
And know this.
The United States will continue to hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground, which, as you know, President Trump believes can be found.
So, you know, Trump says I would listen to a one-state solution in the Middle East, which I thought was completely sane.
But Nikki Haley is in the U.N. and she's saying, you know, no, we're still committed to the two-state solution.
Trump says maybe we should take the oil when we go to Iraq.
Mathis, you know, Mad Dog Mathis is over in Iraq saying, we're not taking your oil.
Don't worry, we're not going to take your oil.
So, I mean, I think there is this thing going on where Trump, you know, kind of freewheels and free associates, and he says these things.
And he is, you know, he's now the president of the United States.
And people are listening to him.
He's sending these guys out.
They are so good.
I mean, while we're talking about Nikki Haley, I just have to play this one cut.
She comes out of her first Security Council meeting.
This woman is becoming like my dream girl.
She's like, you know, I mean, she's like, you know, I shouldn't say such a sexist thing to say that I'm going to say it because this is the Andrew Claven show.
We get to say this.
It's just like, you know, how women, you know, Nikki Haley is a very attractive woman, but women get even hotter when they're also cool.
Listen to what she says coming out of the Security Council.
The Security Council is supposed to discuss how to maintain international peace and security.
But at our meeting on the Middle East, the discussion was not about Hezbollah's illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon.
It was not about the money and weapons Iran provides to terrorists.
It was not about how we defeat ISIS.
It was not about how we hold Bashar al-Assad accountable for the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of civilians.
No.
Instead, the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East.
I am new around here, but I understand that's how the council has operated month after month for decades.
I'm here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore.
I am here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel.
I'm here to emphasize the United States is determined to stand up to the UN's anti-Israel bias.
Be still, my heart.
I just love, I love this girl.
Every time she does, I mean, it is so cool.
You know, it's just finally, finally, finally telling these thugs at the UN, and they are the worst, you know, telling them that we're not going to sit around and let them diss the one democracy in the region.
So what I'm saying is Trump is doing a fantastic job of destroying the left-wing narrative, of fighting back against the left-wing political narrative.
And the people he's appointing are doing a fantastic job of establishing a new narrative of American interests, sane, rational, democratic American interests here and overseas.
Trump sometimes goes a little off the program.
Look, we've got to let Trump be Trump.
I mean, he has succeeded at everything that he said he would, that he said he intended to do, he has done.
So we've got to let Trump be Trump.
But sometimes, I mean, there's got to be some kind of coordination here because other people are listening.
Other countries are listening to what the president says.
Hey, they just got there.
He's not a politician.
He's working on it.
Let's see what he does.
But I think it's important.
But bringing this theme over to the theme of Milo Yiannopoulos, okay?
It is one thing to destroy a narrative that needs destroying, but you've got to replace it with something of value.
This is the whole thing.
And this is why Milo is in trouble.
Milo said this stuff about, well, let's just talk about what happened yesterday.
Milo's publishing contract, his quarter of a million book deal, was dropped and his speaking engagement at CPAC was dropped, although Trump himself is now going to be there, because an old video was found, a little bit rejiggered, but basically he said that he had sex when he was 13 and that he was an aware, sexually aware person and that sometimes this could be a positive thing.
Let's take a listen, give the man a chance.
Let's take a listen to the video he put out yesterday explaining what he was saying.
This is number nine.
I think people can understand.
Obviously there's frustration from some bits of the Republican establishment, but I don't want to blame anyone because I said the things that you've seen and some of them were very stupidly worded.
Some of the wording that I used was dumb.
And if I could go back in most cases, you guys know, if I say something outrageous or offensive, in most cases, my only regret is I didn't piss off more people.
But in this case, if I could do it again, I wouldn't phrase things the same way because it's led to confusions.
For instance, I was told that one of the numbers that people are fixating on is 13, and the implication that I'm at was advocating for sex between 13-year-olds.
Well, the video that came out was edited to include a section where I said that consent was arbitrary and oppressive, but that was from a discussion about affirmative consent on college campuses.
That was placed next to a section about 13-year-olds to make it look like I was saying that consent for 13-year-olds was arbitrary and oppressive, and that's not the case.
When I spoke about relationships between older men and younger men, I used the word boys, and I shouldn't have done that.
Gay people do say like boy and girl to mean people of, you know, consenting adults very often.
Sometimes it's usually like the passive partner gets to, you know, is the boy.
But I understand that straight people wouldn't necessarily know that.
And so, you know, that I wouldn't do again.
All I would reiterate is, you know, you guys know that I can make edgy jokes.
You guys know that I can sometimes push the boundaries of acceptable humor.
This is one of those cases in which I should have phrased things differently.
Okay, fair enough as far as it goes, but this is the problem I've had with Milo from the beginning.
I admire Milo's, first of all, I admire his talent as a performance artist and a troll.
I mean, now we call it a troll, but we used to call it a performance artist.
I admire his ability to destroy political correctness.
Political correctness is mental slavery.
And political correctness does, as Milo himself has pointed out, it creates the very bigotry it means to suppress because it suppresses it.
If I can't say, oh, well, you know, I don't like Jews or whatever I want to say, then that just builds up and it becomes forbidden and therefore becomes attractive, especially to young people.
And Milo has said this repeatedly, that he doesn't feel that young people saying anti-Semitic things online really is about their anti-Semitism.
It's about their trollery.
It's about their wanting to rebel against the slavery of political correctness.
The problem is when you break the shackles, they break the narrative of political correctness, which so much needs to be done, you've got to replace it with something of value, and that means taking care.
Listen, as an artist, Milo can say anything he damn well pleases.
If he wants to say that he's in favor of 13-year-old boys, and the stuff he said, look, sex is complicated.
Sex is very complicated.
People's relationships are complicated.
He was basically talking about his own life.
You want to say that stuff?
Hey, go ahead and say it.
Nobody can stop you.
But then you can't go to CPAC, right?
It's the same as the stuff we say here.
Like, if I want to be a funny guy and get a show on Comedy Central, I can't say the stuff I say here.
I just don't happen to care.
It's like the Buddhists say, you suffer for your desires.
I don't have the desire to move this show to Comedy Central.
So I can say anything I want because it's more important to me to say what I want than it is to be on Comedy Central.
If what he wants is to be looked down as a sage, is to be able to address crowds of political people, then he's got to curtail his tongue, just like every other politician except for Donald Trump.
But even Donald Trump doesn't go around saying it's okay to sleep with 13-year-olds.
So this guy is like basically trying to have it both ways.
And the thing is, if you are going to destroy, you know, people are upset.
I can hear people are being upset.
Why are we letting him be destroyed?
Why are we letting him be shut down?
We're letting him be shut down because he said something ugly and vile.
And he has said other things that are ugly and vile.
And he has supported people who are ugly and vile.
And though his mission, his positive mission, his negative mission, I should say, to strike down political correctness, is God's work, right?
He's got to replace the thing that he strikes down with something of value.
And he has failed to do that.
And he's failed, in this case, rather spectacularly, even with the corrections he's made, because there are other things that he's said that kind of, you know, are very disturbing.
He has failed spectacularly to make that replacement.
And that's what I don't want to see happen to Trump.
That's why I'm concerned with the things that come out of Trump's mouth.
It's not that I want to bring Trump down.
I want to make sure that he succeeds because I think in destroying the narrative, he's doing God's work.
I want him to do God's work when he replaces it with something as well.
Replacing Values00:03:20
Finally, stuff I like.
Before I get to stuff I like, let me just remind you one more time.
Mailbag tomorrow.
Get in your questions today.
Answer them all.
Guaranteed, change your life, possibly for the better.
Eh, you know, it's a crap shoot, let's be honest.
But it will change your life.
Stuff I like.
We're talking about the American mythology of the old movies, you know, and how it partook of sentimentality, but at the same time, it communicated something of true value, something that was really worthwhile.
And here is a film that meant a tremendous amount to me when I was a kid.
It is not, I would say, a four-star film or a five-star film now, we would say.
It is probably a four-star film if we're going by five stars.
It's called Edison the Man.
And the reason this was important to me was Thomas Edison was my hero when I was a little kid.
When I was a little kid, I just, I wanted to be an inventor because I loved Edison, his life so much.
I read all the biographies in the library and all this stuff.
I always noticed, though, that I couldn't think of anything to invent.
So I always thought that's probably a sign that maybe I needed to get a better job.
But this particular scene, when I was a little kid, moved me tremendously.
Edison and his wife are suffering financially.
And she keeps coming to him and saying, you know, it's nice about the whole thing about trying to invent a light bulb tonight, but we have no money.
We have no money.
And he's lying asleep.
Edison was a famous catnapper.
This also always appealed to me because I'm a catnapper.
And Edison didn't sleep much, but he slept in these five-minute increments.
And so Spencer Tracy is playing Thomas Edison.
He is asleep.
And she wakes him up to tell him that to worry him about money, that we've got to think about money.
And he tells her, I don't have time to play the whole thing, but he tells her this elaborate dream he has, this mythological dream.
And this is the last few minutes and what he says to her and how his wife responds.
The earth gave a grunt and began to move.
and the sun waked up beautiful.
I lit my pipe by the light of his top knot.
Broke off a piece for myself.
Yes, ma'am, I walked home with sunrise in my pocket.
Oh, Tom, that's beautiful.
You go on with your work.
Go right ahead with your light.
Don't listen to anyone who tries to stop you.
Don't even listen to me if I talk against it.
Nothing in the world can happen to us as long as you can dream like that.
Well now, Mary, maybe I didn't dream it exactly.
Maybe I got it mixed up with an old tall tale my mother used to tell me.
No, I'd rather have it a dream.
Please let it be a dream.
All right.
You feel better that way.
Thank you.
I think you were a couple of laps ahead of me all the time.
Sentimental stuff, but that became, as a kid, my gold standard, not just for inspiration, but my gold standard for what a marriage should be.
And I think that it is an art, an art that we've lost the ability to do, to communicate those values without being sentimental.
Communicating Values Without Sentimentality00:00:49
This was the sentimentality of the time.
It doesn't date well.
But I think that the values that it was communicating were really spectacular.
And I'd like to see, you know, the only guy who comes close to doing it now is that guy who's just attacking Trump on air, the guy who made like Knocked Up and Jed Apatau, yeah, that he does it with this filthy, you know, this filthy language and all this, but the values come through.
I'd like to see more films that recover American history for people because if we lose our love and our affection and our knowledge of American history and of Western history and of the meaning of it, then there'll be no one there to defend it.
And that's the thing we're looking to rebuild as the narrative of the left collapses, God willing.