Andrew C. McCarthy and Andrew Clavin dissect fake news through media bias, like CNN’s framing of the AHCA’s 14–20 million uninsured as a failure while ignoring its $350B deficit cut. McCarthy debunks Russia election interference claims, exposing Obama-era overreach and clarifying no evidence exists of vote tampering or Trump collusion. He contrasts patriotic Muslims with Sharia-supremacist Islamists, advocating ideological vetting while protecting religious freedom. The episode also critiques intersectionality as a tool for leftist power grabs, then pivots to film analysis—Get Out as racially themed horror, Fences as a universal tale of generational resentment—concluding that systemic narratives often mask timeless human struggles. [Automatically generated summary]
Many of you may recently have heard the term intersectionality and you may have asked, what is intersectionality?
Or you may have asked, why can't you just shut up and leave me the hell alone?
Let me try to answer at least one of those questions.
Intersectionality is a term invented by Kimberly Crenshaw, and she's a law professor specializing in gender and race, so you know whatever she says is going to be great.
Intersectionality is the theory that people can be understood through intersecting social identities, such as race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation.
It's only when the effect of all your interwoven identities is fully understood that you know how much you're allowed to blame your crappy life on other people.
Blaming your crappy life on other people is called being oppressed.
And being oppressed gives you the right to shout stupid stuff while wearing a pink hat that makes you look like a complete idiot.
This is a good thing because it keeps you from having to do something useful, which can be hard and take up a lot of your social media time.
If you don't have enough intersecting social identities, then you are just some schmuck or a white guy.
And you have to work for a living to pay taxes to support intersectional people so they have time to scream at you and blame you for their crappy lives.
Now you may say, well, wait, in America, people aren't really oppressed very much, and they can improve their lots by rising above the dysfunction in their communities in order to live productive lives.
These are called facts.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people using facts are fascist and can be assaulted by intersectional people wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks.
You may say, assaulted by people wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks?
Isn't that the definition of fascism?
That is called logic.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people using logic are fascist and can be assaulted by intersectional people wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks.
Some people object to the underlying ideas of intersectionality.
These people say that human identity is not just some collection of personal traits organized into interest groups as a way of turning Americans against one another so that leftists can seize power by pretending they're alleviating various forms of oppression that don't actually exist.
These people go on to say that each person's identity is unique and God-given and that what you make of your identity depends on your choices and the natural luck of the draw.
These people add that in fact, if you were lucky enough to be born in America, you've already been given a head start and have no business complaining about anything.
So take off your idiotic pink hat and stop shouting stupid things and go get a job.
This is called truth.
And under the rules of intersectionality, people who speak the truth are fascist and can be assaulted by intersectional people wearing balaclavas and carrying sticks.
So now you understand.
Intersectionality is a new and original way of weaving together facts, logic, and truth and beating them to death.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Anger Is the Devil's Cocaine00:04:39
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshape, dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
All right.
The great Andrew C. McCarthy is going to be with us at about.
Can we stay on Facebook maybe and let everybody.
All right.
Let's say we'll stay on and let you folks on Facebook see Andrew McCarthy.
What's that?
They don't deserve it.
They don't deserve it, yeah, because you haven't paid your lousy eight bucks.
But we want, he's one of my favorite political writers, just a great writer, great guy, great insights into Islam and into the law and into all this Russian stuff and the hacking, really knows what he's talking about.
So we're looking forward to having him.
And if you want to come over to thedailywire.com and subscribe, I should be clear about this.
I sometimes say if you subscribe, you get a free gift, but you have to subscribe for an entire year, right?
It's still a lousy eight bucks a month, but you sign in, sign up for the whole year, and then this is the last day you can get the Arroyo.
We are giving you away a movie, The Arroyo.
Good stuff about the Border Wars.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
Let me tell you a story about the mailbag.
I got to tell you this.
I got a letter from a guy named Ryan, and I asked his permission to tell the story.
He was having romantic problems with his girlfriend, very serious problems in the sense that he thought it was time that they tied the knot and she wasn't sure and she wanted to wait a long time and he was really confused about this.
And he's a college guy and he can't afford the lousy eight bucks a month to subscribe to the Daily Wire, so he can't send his question into the mailbag.
Though he had a question, how do I deal with this situation?
So he prayed, which also works, okay?
Like you can go to the mailbag or you can go to God.
And sometimes those both are good answers.
So Ryan prayed for guidance, turned on the show, heard the mailbag, and I answered the exact question that he had sent to me from a guy named Ryan.
He put the advice we gave him into effect, and now he has cleared up the problem with his girlfriend and everything is going really well.
He wrote me a letter.
It was called the conveyor of God or an instrument of God, an instrument of God, something like that.
So that's what we're offering you on this show.
We're not making any big offers.
We're just saying we're instruments of God.
And if you ask our questions, we will solve all your problems.
That's tomorrow.
So get your questions in today for the mailbag and we will answer them guaranteed to change your life possibly for the better.
All right, so we have a saying here on the Andrew Clavin show: anger is the devil's cocaine.
And everybody hates the saying.
Everybody gets angry when I say this because anger is the devil's cocaine.
Now, if you have any friends, I'm a writer, so I know a lot of addicts, okay?
A lot of writers are drunks and they drink too much and all this stuff.
If you have any friends who are addicted to anything, you know, from coffee to whiskey to cocaine or whatever, you know that if you have ever, as a friend, gotten between them and the thing that they are addicted to, their entire personality changes like that on the spot and they become enraged.
So you have a friend, he's jovial, he's funny, but he drinks too much.
One day you say to him, you know, maybe you ought to cut back the drinking.
Suddenly the joviality is gone and you stink.
You are the worst person.
Just do not get between.
So when you get between angry people and their anger, they get angry, you know, because anger is the devil's cocaine.
And the problem with anger is people say, well, my anger is righteous.
And it may well be.
There's perfectly righteous reasons to get angry.
But anger can be righteous, but it's not righteousness.
And the problem with anger, and the reason I say it's of the devil, is that it convinces you that you're righteous.
It makes you feel like when you're hating that guy on the other, you feel like you are so good.
And, you know, it's obviously a problem on the left because anger is all they've got now.
They have no policy solutions or anything like that.
So they're just out there screaming.
But if you listen to their chants, they're completely irrational and they've got those pink hats on and they're shaking.
And we're oppressed.
You say, well, how are you oppressed?
Well, look at me.
I'm wearing a pink hat and standing in the street.
You know, it's like you think like, well, you don't have to actually be doing that.
But there's also anger on the right.
You know, I have to play this little piece of Alex Jones, Alex Jones, who is the Keith Olberman of the right.
I mean, he is just, this is Alex Jones.
And, you know, this is a guy the president reputedly likes.
You know, this is Alex Jones reacting to some left-wing political satire from Alec Baldwin.
Why Obamacare Might Fail00:07:59
Okay, Alec Baldwin makes some jokes on SNL.
This is Alex Jones' reaction.
Alec Baldwin thinks he's a tough guy.
I challenge him a million dollars, the charity he wants, to get in the ring with me, bare knuckle.
You coward, you think you're a tough guy messing with little cameraman people.
You freaking bully, you coward.
I hate you.
My listeners hate you and remember that scumbag forever.
We're going to defeat this anti-human scum.
We're going to wreck their world.
I just want to remind you, this is the host of the match game we're talking about.
I mean, Alec Baldwin is a left-wing loudmouth.
It's not illegal in this country.
You know, you can be a left-wing loudmouth actor.
They're all left.
All the actors are left-wing loudmouths.
He's going to pay him a million dollars to get in a ring with him bare knuckle.
Because we're going to wreck your world.
So there's a little bit of it.
So the reason I bring this up is because we're going to be talking today about fake news, which is, as far as I'm concerned at this point, almost all news that comes out of the mainstream media.
And it's not fake because it's untrue.
It's fake because it's all slanted to the left.
And one of the reasons I want to have Andy McCarthy on is because he speaks so well about the facts behind these stories.
Yesterday, the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, comes out with a report on the new health care bill.
Now, listen to this care.
This is really interesting.
The American Health Care Act, it says, would cut the budget deficit.
So this is a prediction, right?
And this is amazingly complex.
We're talking about a huge swath of the economy.
Nobody really knows.
Nobody really knows what the effect is going to be.
But they're trying to come up with a prediction, okay?
The American Health Care Act would cut the budget deficit by $337 billion over 10 years as the bill replaces Obamacare subsidies with tax credits, and rationalizes its Medicaid expansion and repeals its tax increases.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
The bill would cut taxes by nearly $900 billion while cutting spending by $1.2 trillion.
So that's good.
CBO thinks 14 million people on net would be uninsured in 2018 relative to the Obamacare status quo.
So they're saying ultimately over 20 million people, as they put it on the air, would lose insurance.
They keep saying they would lose insurance.
Why would they lose insurance?
The initial coverage plunge would be due to repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate.
So in other words, when the government stops forcing you to buy Obamacare, it's such a garbage product that people will stop buying it.
That's what they're saying.
All they're saying is that people, if they're not forced to buy Obamacare, will not buy Obamacare.
And the CBO is only calculating what happens when government forces you to do it.
They're not calculating what will happen when, as predicted, the cost of insurance goes down.
If the cost of insurance goes down and competition extends and people can say, well, you know, I only want to insure this much and I only want to insure this kind of disease and I don't want to pay for this, but I want to pay for that.
A lot of those people are going to choose on their own, off their own bat to buy insurance.
So the prediction is only those people who might say, we're not buying this crappy Obamacare because you're not forcing us to buy it anymore.
What's funny about this is this CBO report, which of course the Democrats jumped on, and that's their job, to jump on the Republicans.
That's why they're elected to do that.
You know, that's fine.
But this report sounds like they're repealing and replacing Obamacare, right?
The taxes going down, deficit going down, number of people insured by force going down.
This is a good thing.
I mean, Paul Ryan goes out and he's trying to put a good face on this thing because it sounds like all the press is reporting is that people are going to lose insurance.
And what he says is virtually true.
Play the Ryan cut.
The estimates before were that more, 25 million people would be on Obamacare today, less than half that are.
But look at what they said, the reason why they think this uninsured would happen.
We're saying the government's not going to force people to buy something they don't want to buy.
And if we end an Obamacare mandate that says you must buy this government one-size-fits-all plan, guess what?
People aren't going to buy that.
So of course they're going to suggest that if we're not going to make people do something they don't want to do, they're not going to do it.
That's really what's behind this.
What I'm encouraged is once our reforms kick in, what the CBO is telling us is it's going to lower premiums.
It will lower premiums 10%.
It stabilizes the market.
It's a $1.2 trillion spending cut, an $883 billion tax cut, and $37 billion in deficit reduction.
So of course the CBO is going to say if you're not going to force people to buy something they don't want to buy, they won't buy it.
But at the same time, they're saying our reforms will kick in and lower premiums and make healthcare therefore more accessible.
And by the way, Brett, I just want to say one more thing, then I'll stop talking.
This is just part one of a three-part plan, and that's why I'm excited.
Just this, they say, lowers premiums, stabilizes the market, gives people more choice and freedom.
That is a fair interpretation of this thing.
And you know, people say I'm too easy on Ryan, but remember, Ryan doesn't have to just deal with conservatives.
He has to deal with a large swath of moderates who have said to him, we will not vote if we have to go back and tell our constituents that they're going to lose insurance.
And people hearing this and they're hearing it on CNN, you know, think, oh, we're going to lose insurance.
Now, here's the point, okay?
It's very, this is a complicated bill.
It's a complicated issue.
We don't all know what's going on.
And people start to use phrases like, oh, is Obamacare light?
And this, and they gin up your anger, and so you, and so people aren't sure what they're hearing.
But I just want to just show you how this is being covered.
Listen to CNN covering this story, how everybody's going to lose their insurance.
This is the CNN on Obama, on Ryancare, number six.
It is estimated that 15 million Americans potentially will lose their health care coverage over the course of 10 years under this new plan.
Republicans anticipating this are already trying to downplay this potential.
House Speaker Paul Ryan can't answer how many Americans will lose health care coverage under his plan to replace Obamacare.
At home, have you heard any Republicans say nobody will lose coverage under this plan?
I promise.
If you haven't, there's a reason.
All right, they're going to lose it.
They have no answers.
You're going to lose your plan.
You're going to lose your health care.
You're going to.
Listen to the way they covered Obamacare.
So help me.
I am not making this up.
This is CNN covering Obamacare when it was still being debated.
Time to go into work again.
Welcome to the world of medicine.
Whoa, here we go again.
The hospital's packed with people in a long line.
Agitated because we waited for a long time.
This is all so crazy.
Too many missing coverage lately.
My tummy's friend and I'm feeling kind of sickly.
My hands are bad and I feel weak.
And the price is always rising up.
Conservatives and liberals say to reform health care today.
But they can't seem to find the way.
So we throw our hands up for health care form.
Make your choice today.
Private and public care.
Will the marketplace treat us fair?
So we throw our hands up for health care form.
Make your choice today.
Yay, yay, yay, yes.
It's a problem in the USA.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a problem in the USA.
So adorable school children singing, it's a problem in the USA, just a little different the way they go.
And this is what makes people insane with anger.
And this is all I'm saying to you: don't become reactive because you're being lied to constantly, and it does make people crazy.
And with that, let me bring on one of my favorite political writers, Andrew C. McCarthy, writes for the National Review.
FISA Court and Trump Investigation00:15:35
He is a former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar, the blind sheikh we'll call him, so I don't have to say the whole thing, and 11 others.
The blind sheik, sadly, because of what a nasty guy Andy is, I think he believes he died in jail after just all he did was try to blow up Americans.
I don't know why we would be anyway.
He is really one of the clearest writers with one of the clearest moral visions.
Have we got him?
There he is.
All right.
I can't see you, Andy.
Oh, there you are.
I'll have to look up.
How's it going, Val?
It's good to see you.
It's going great.
How could I top that?
That's right.
You better be good now.
This is a bit.
No, I had this song and dance thing, but I didn't take it.
You were going to sing the whole the FISA court.
So we're talking about the way the press plays things.
And I want to start out.
I got to start out with this pre-prior thing.
This is the attorney who had to be fired.
There you are.
Had to be fired from the Justice Department because he refused to quit like everybody else.
His resignation was asked for.
So let's start with this fellow himself.
In the New York Times this morning, there are two separate stories basically deifying this guy, making him Saint Preet of the Southern District of Manhattan because he stood up to the Obama administration and they're really just trying to protect Fox News from an investigation into their sexual predatory practices.
Who is this guy, first of all?
Well, he happens to have worked for me his first year in, well, he worked for the American people, but I was his supervisor.
And I thought very well of him, Drew.
I think, you know, he's a fabulously talented lawyer and what do they say, a terrific temperament to go with a great intellect.
I didn't even know, and this is the wonderful thing about the nature of the office, I didn't know his politics at all because what the job is about is applying, you know, figuring out what the facts are and applying the law to them.
And when it's done correctly, you don't need to know anyone's politics.
And even if you do, that gets checked at the door when you're doing the work.
And, you know, look, in New York, I'd have been an awful lonely guy if I couldn't make friends with liberal lawyers, right?
So the fact that he prosecuted Dinesh D'Souza, did that prosecution bug you at all?
It did.
Yeah, I think that his tenure will be remembered well because for the most part, especially in the political corruption area, which is where he made his mark, he tended to follow the evidence wherever it went.
And, you know, if either party ended up in the trick bag, that's the way it went.
I thought the two places where he kind of besmirched himself and is very unfortunate both for him and for the office, I think, the way it'll be remembered, is the D'Souza case, which really should have been settled as an administrative fine.
It was barely an infraction of the election laws, and it was geometrically smaller than the offense that the Obama 2008 campaign committed.
They were allowed to settle their offense with a fine.
They tried to throw the book at D'Souza.
And it's clearly a politicized prosecution.
And then the other thing is this prima donna routine on the way out the door.
I sense that my old colleague Preet is hoping to have a political career.
The unfortunate thing is, what's required in democratic policy, politics nowadays, is not a graceful resignation letter where you thank the people of New York and the Justice Department for the privilege.
And it really is a high privilege of leading that institution, which he did in a very admirable way, for the most part, for a long time.
Instead, what you have to do is the obligatory insult to Trump, the suggestion that your removal means that some corruption case against him might be buried.
I think Preet made some snark about how, you know, now I know how the Moreland Commission felt when you went out.
And the Moreland Commission is a state vehicle for trying to unearth, you know, New York state corruption.
So the obvious implication is that by removing him, they bury stuff.
And, you know, the Southern District of New York, in just the last generation, has been led by Rudy Giuliani, Mary Joe White, Jim Comey, Mike Garcia.
You know, it had a very storied tradition before Rudy ever came along of being independent from the Justice Department.
In fact, we arrogantly refer to ourselves as the sovereign district of New York because of the notorious independence from the Justice Department, which included doing political corruption cases wherever the evidence took you.
That was not a pre-Perrara innovation, notwithstanding what the time seems to be.
Okay, all right.
Now, let's you've been writing about this, both the Russian hack and this Trump's accusations of being bugged.
Let's start with the Russian hack.
You basically feel, I mean, it is now such a complicated story with so much smoke that I don't see any facts.
I haven't seen one thing that made me think like, oh my God, you know, Trump is working for Smersh.
But you basically wrote that this thing has fallen apart.
Do you feel that there's no there?
Well, what I think is that in the haste to go after Trump on the part of the media with this hacking the election narrative, there was always risk for both the Democrats and the media because if it turned out that there was no there there in the sense of that the election was actually hacked as opposed to that the Russians did what the Russians have been doing for decades,
that people were suddenly going to stop for a second and say, I don't really see a lot of evidence that Russia did anything that actually impacted the election, but I'd really like to know, how do we know all this stuff?
Where are these leaks from law enforcement coming from?
And then when you start to ask that question, the scandal suddenly becomes not that the Russians hacked the election, but that the incumbent president and his administration were conducting an investigation of the opposition party's nominee, or at least the campaign, and not only conducting an investigation, but doing it simultaneously with whitewashing a very serious felony case against Hillary Clinton.
So it seemed to me that if you went along this line and you hit the jackpot and you actually came up with the Russians actually did steal the election and Trump's fingerprints were on it somehow, you know, look, then you have the story of the century.
But if you don't have the story of the century, then you got a pretty serious, you know, potential political corruption story, which is worse.
So this is the thing that bothers me.
You know, with Hillary Clinton, all we ever heard is there's no smoking gun.
And I always thought, yeah, there's a big pile of bleach bit, and under the bleach bit is where a piece of metal that used to be a smoking gun.
But here, suddenly, Trump says I've been bugged, and everybody is saying, well, Sean Spicer walked that back.
He didn't actually mean that Obama crept into his hotel room and placed a bug in his phone.
But after all, if they were listening in on conversations from his campaign, that's pretty serious business.
I don't want to parse words here.
I mean, do you believe that that was happening?
I don't think there's any question that it was happening because the Times, for example, has reported gleefully up until the story kind of turned on them that there was a very vigorous FBI counterintelligence investigation into the, well, at times they've said directed at the Trump people.
At other times, they seem to have said directed at the Russians, which had an ancillary Trump angle to it.
But one way or the other, the way this was pitched was, again, Russia hacked the election and it was done in cahoots with Trump.
Now that there really doesn't seem to be much there.
I mean, even people like Clapper come up to come out and say, you know, I don't see any evidence of collusion by Trump.
And what I've tried to point out is there's a big difference between hacking emails, which they clearly did, and hacking the election, which they clearly didn't.
So even the object of the conspiracy didn't happen.
So you don't have the conspiracy and you don't have the object of the conspiracy.
So the thing was bound to fall apart.
Now they're walking back from the idea that there was even an investigation because, again, I think there's more risk for them in the idea that there was an investigation than what it is that they were investigating.
So Comey goes to the intelligence people and says, make sure everybody knows that we didn't do this, right?
Do you think they, I mean, they saw something happened because the Times was reporting the results of the investigation.
Yeah, Drew, this is where you have to really put your nerdy lawyer hat on and parse the words they say very carefully.
Because I thought what Jim Comey, who I've known since we both started out as prosecutors under Rudy Giuliani about 30 years ago, what Jim Comey had to say and what Jim Clapper, the former National Intelligence Director, had to say, was a carefully parsed denial that what Trump specifically alleged, namely that Obama wiretapped never occurred.
But I think I don't take either of them to have denied the larger trajectory of the story that there was this investigation of what the Russians were up to that somehow either targeted associates of Trump who had varying connections to the campaign, or those people came up in the course of investigating the Russians.
Now, there's so much backpedaling going on, it's hard to understand exactly what their theory is at the moment.
So basically we can say, as far as we know, there was no hack of the election.
Basically, they phished Podesta and he sent them his password.
You have to say, even I know not to do that.
He sent them their password and they broke out as dreams.
Exactly.
So they got that.
And there is no evidence as far as you can see of any collusion from the campaign with the Russians in doing this.
And it does seem like there was at least some way that they were getting phone calls, even if they were just investigating the Russians.
It seems that the Obama administration, whether he knew it directly or not, I always call this the meddlesome priest rule because Obama was very good at passing on the idea that something should be done without ever giving the order to do it.
And you do believe that they were actually listening in to some conversations here.
Yeah.
Now, here's another interesting bit of parsing going on, right?
One of the things they're backpedaling on now is whether there was a FISA application.
In other words, was there a wiretap application that was brought to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that named either Trump himself, that's unlikely, or associates of Trump's as an agent of a foreign power.
In other words, not to get too deep in the weeds, but if you want to do a traditional criminal wiretap, you have to have probable cause of a crime.
If you want to do a foreign intelligence wiretap, you have to show probable cause that someone's acting as an agent of a foreign power.
So there's a big to-do now about whether they went to the FISA court or not.
And what I try to point out in a column on Monday is that that may all be a head fake because the way that we do intelligence now, the way the NSA does it, in addition to targeted wiretaps on people who you say are agents of a foreign power, we also have the NSA doing very generalized,
non-particular wiretaps or surveillance sweeps that pull in information about 193 different countries based on over a thousand what are called intelligence requirements that are set by the executive branch.
And in addition to that, when they're doing foreign intelligence that's clearly at least aimed outside the United States, they have other ways of doing it besides FISA.
So they're taking in millions of communications in their database.
And what inevitably happens is they capture thousands of Americans, including Americans talking to Americans in the United States, if they're either talking about foreign people who are under investigation or there's some foreign intelligence reason for it.
And while the NSA is supposed to mask the identity of those people, that's their so-called minimization procedures, the minimization has like Swiss cheese in terms of the anybody who gets caught in this net, basically.
Yeah, if the NSA decides that, well, we have to know the identity of the American person in order to exploit and understand the full intelligence value of the conversation, they will not mask it.
Or if the Attorney General decides there's enough evidence to believe that X person may be an agent of a foreign power, they're allowed to use that person's identity as a selection term and put it through their database and pull out whatever conversations they've recorded.
So my point is that you're now able to do FISA without saying you're doing FISA.
You can get a lot in the way of communications without having to go to the court and say, we think this person's an agent of a foreign power.
Got it.
Okay.
You know, I'm running out of time.
I want to ask you just one other thing on another subject.
You know, I noticed that they're having this big fight over in Amsterdam with the Turks, and the Turks are, you know, Erdoigen is yelling and screaming that he's being unfairly treated and calling the Dutch Hitler.
And Steve King, Congressman King, got in trouble basically saying, you know, we have to, we can't increase our own population using other people's babies and all this stuff.
You became really educated in Islam and in Islamism while you were prosecuting the blind sheep.
One of the reasons I feel that Trump got elected is that people got sick and tired of this idea that they were being bad guys by questioning whether Islam is a perfect fit with Western values, okay?
But every time I've heard you speak on this, you always speak in a very measured way about this.
What do you think our approach should be to this?
I mean, I don't want to yell at patriotic Muslim people.
I don't want to bother people how they pray.
Nobody does, I don't think.
But something really does bother me here about this onslaught of people with a value system that just may not fit with ours.
Does that bother you?
It bothers me a lot, but I think the problem that we have wrapping our brain around this, and it's been the same problem for 30 years, is that the challenge came to us as a terrorism challenge.
Sharia Supremacism Not Religion00:02:50
And that was the way that we understood it.
So the bright line that we imposed at the beginning between who was a moderate and who was someone to worry about was terrorism.
And what we have assiduously done in all these years is put our head in the sand about the ideology that fuels the terrorism, which is really, I call it Sharia supremacism.
Other people have different ways.
Radical Islam is kind of the general catch-all.
But I think Sharia is the thing to look at, Drew, because that's what both the terrorists and the non-terrorist Islamists want to impose on not only their own societies, but on Western societies.
So to me, the bright line is, if you're a Muslim, but you're pro-Western, pro-constitutional, and you don't want the state run under Sharia strictures, then we not only open our arms to you, we actually have to have a lot of gratitude to those people because they not only fight in our military, without those patriotic Muslims, we wouldn't have been able, for example, in my case in the 90s,
have infiltrated the blind sheikh cell and prevented a terrorist act that could have killed tens of thousands of people.
On the other hand, if you are an Islamist and you want to supplant American democracy and civil liberties with Sharia, which is a repressive, discriminatory, and in some particulars, a cruel system, we may be very grateful that you don't want to blow up a bridge to bring that about, but you are not a moderate, and we shouldn't treat you as a moderate.
And if you're an alien, I think that we have to be able to vet for that in terms of bringing people into the country.
And we should understand that we're not talking about religion.
We're talking about political ideology with the veneer of religion.
We don't want to give Muslims who are simply spiritual Muslims in the United States a harder time.
I don't want to know any more about their religion than I want to know about anyone else's religion.
But if you're, we have a long history in this country of dealing with totalitarian ideologies that want to supplant our Constitution.
And until we understand Sharia supremacism as that rather than as religion, I think we're going to continue to chase our tails this way.
Is this kind of clarity is why I come and read you at the National Review.
Andy, thanks a lot.
I will see you in a couple of days in Washington.
It's great to have you.
Thanks.
Looking forward to it.
Bye-bye.
Andy McCarthy.
Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review, really one of the clearest thinkers on Islam and the law.
And just, yeah, just a lot of clarity.
All right.
Stuff I like.
This week, we are talking about films that are liberal films, basically about African Americans, about black people, that actually have a conservative message by accident.
And I want to talk about fences.
You know, yesterday I was talking about Get Out.
Fences And Race00:06:21
And when I saw Get Out, there were previews.
And the way they do previews is they try and think people who are interested in this film might be interested in that film.
So if you go see an action film, you see action previews.
If you see a drama, you see drama previews.
And Get Out, which is a horror film that I think anybody might like.
I mean, you certainly, there should be no racial ticket at the door.
It's got, you know, it's got a black star, and it has racial themes.
But it's a horror film with interesting American themes.
They played a preview for a film called Girls Trip, which is a body, which is the polite way.
It's filthy.
It was disgusting.
It was like a bunch of girls, all of them black, go off on a trip, and it's their sex life, and it's like bridesmaids and all this stuff.
But it was just, even the preview, the preview, they had to give a preview a red R-rated sign because even the preview was so filthy.
And just, it was just, you know, I don't mind a little filth.
I really don't.
I really don't mind raunch if it's funny, if they're going someplace that you've never seen before.
But this was just atrocious.
And I thought the only reason they're playing this is because the people in it are black, you know?
And here's the point.
So I watched Fences, and I'm a big Denzel Washington fan.
I think everybody's a big Denzel Washington fan.
He's one of the last movie stars.
He's a great actor.
And he obviously made this film.
This is an August Wilson play, a really fine writer.
Wilson died 12 years ago.
He died in 2005.
But he wrote the screenplay before he died.
And I think Denzel Washington wanted to get his performance on screen because it's a performance for the ages, okay?
And what he plays is he plays a guy in, I guess it's the 50s.
I'm saying the play was written in the 1980s, but I guess he's the father of a household in the 50s.
He's had a tough life.
He went to prison at one point, but then he was a baseball player in the Negro Leagues before blacks were allowed to play in the white leagues.
And so he was as talented as he was, he was cheated out of the big time by the color of his skin.
Now all that has gone away and he is a garbage man and he is at once filled with life and vitality and a kind of animal joy and at the same time a bitter, closed-off guy who's never quite gotten over it.
And he shuts out everybody in his life, everybody who tries to love him.
He can't really deal with him.
Here's a scene where his son approaches him and just doesn't understand why he's always so tough on him.
And he says, why don't you like me?
How come you ain't never liked me?
Like you?
Who the hell said I got to like you?
What law is there say I got to like you want to stand up in front of my face and ask a damn fool ass question like that?
Talking about liking somebody.
Come here, boy, when I talk to you.
Straighten up.
Damn it.
I asked you a question.
What law is there say I got to like you?
None.
All right then.
Don't you eat every day?
Answer me when I talk to you.
Don't you eat every day?
Yeah.
As long as you're in my house, you put a syrup on the end of it when you talk to me.
Yes, sir.
You eat every day.
Yes, sir.
You got a roof over your head.
Yes, sir.
Got clothes on your back.
Yes, sir.
Why do you think that is?
Because of you?
Hell, I know it's because of me.
But why do you think that is?
Because you like me?
It's just a great scene.
And he's just a tough, tough father, tough husband to be married to, and all this stuff.
But he does bring this life and joy.
So I'm watching this thing.
And first of all, what I'm thinking is, God, he reminds me of my father in certain ways.
And then I realized he reminds everybody of a certain kind of father.
If you follow American playwriting literature, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which obviously August Wilson, he's obviously writing out of that tradition, Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill.
This American character of a father, because America has, or had at least, this wonderful social mobility, and because each generation did better than the last, fathers were faced with sons who were going on to become more than they were.
And that made them reflect back on their lives with a certain amount of bitterness.
So, you know, somebody says at one point to Denzel's character, somebody says, well, you were in the Negro Leagues before, and he says there shouldn't have been any before.
And of course, that's true, but this is the way life is.
And especially in America, the very fact that things improve in America means people are stuck with a life that happened before that improvement, if you understand what I mean.
In other words, he might have said, he might have taken a different attitude and said, oh, joy, my son is going to get to live in a world that I didn't get to live in.
But instead, he's stuck in his own bitterness.
And, you know, you can't blame him, but he's stuck in his own bitterness and his rage and all this.
And he takes it out on his son and actually thwarts his son in many ways, basically because he doesn't want him to be better than he was.
And this is a classic American story.
And so when I say that there's a conservative message in here, the message is simple.
We're all exactly alike.
I mean, people are exactly alike.
You put them in the same situation, and they will have a lot of the same emotions.
The father in fences is the father, the Jewish father, essentially, in Death of a Salesman.
He doesn't say he's Jewish, but he essentially is.
It's the Irish father in Long Day's Journey into Night.
He's any father who got caught in that assimilation process where he was the guy who didn't quite make it because the assimilation hadn't happened yet, and he has to watch his son go on and do more or do less than he did because of who he was.
And it's really, it really is a beautiful American play.
It's a spectacular performance by Denzel Washington.
Viola Davis, of course, is a great actress, but there's something about what Denzel is doing here that is just like an unbelievable piece of acting.
It's kept from being a great movie by the fact that he never gets outside the play.
You know, he can't quite beat the play.
It's still a play, basically, but still, it's a wonderful performance, really worth watching, and really moving in the sense that he's everybody.
You know, it's like really the race thing is incidental to the truth of the play.
All right, the mailbag tomorrow.
Get your questions in.
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We're just vehicles of God.
I am joking, by the way, but we will answer your questions.
Our answers will change your life potentially for the better.