Ep. 298’s host skewers partisan hypocrisy—from Ivanka Trump’s fictional Syria demands to Bill O’Reilly’s settlements—while defending Trump’s airstrikes as necessary despite "America First" critiques, citing 89% negative media coverage in his first 100 days. He contrasts elite moral decay (Charles Murray’s Coming Apart) with working-class values, then uses Downfall to warn against blind loyalty to flawed leaders, urging conservatives to reject both Trump’s infidelity and Democratic overreach while clinging to principles like fidelity and anti-harassment—even if elites dismiss them as outdated. The episode ends with a plea: pragmatism must never erase moral lines. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the long clavenless week of clavenless, clavenlessness is finally over.
People around the world spent the weekend celebrating by attending church services, eating chocolate eggs, and gathering with family for prayers of Thanksgiving.
Although, to be honest, that may have just been a coincidence.
But while I spent the week far away in England where the happy, barefoot, carefree natives speak a language Americans can't understand, namely English, I did manage to keep up with world events by reading various American news sites.
So, to begin this festive clavin tide, allow me to present a roundup of the week's news as described on these sites.
After a poison gas attack in Syria, Ivanka Trump apparently got very upset and demanded that daddy bomb someone right this minute.
President Trump, who can never deny his daughter anything because she's just so hot, unleashed a devastating aerial attack on either Syria or Iraq or Steve Bannon.
He always gets those three confused.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un responded, for some reason, by detonating a nuclear device that blew him into the kitchen pantry, where he spent the next three days eating a particularly succulent Jop Chai pork with potato noodles.
At this point, presidential spokesman Sean Spicer mistakenly announced that Adolf Hitler never used poison gas against his own citizens, when in fact, poison gas was kind of a thing with Hitler, causing many high-ranking Nazis to remark, ah, that Hitler always met to poison gas.
Spicer quickly issued an apology which read in full, quote, shut up or I'll punch you repeatedly in the face, unquote.
Nancy Pelosi then demanded Spicer resign, saying, quote, if we allow public officials to say such amazingly stupid things, before you know it, I'll be in Congress, unquote.
Spicer responded by placing Pelosi's head in a vice and tightening it until the top of her skull blew off, revealing a jack-in-the-box clown where most people keep their brains.
In the aftermath, Steve Bannon was fired, according to an anonymous source who once drove by the White House and said it looked like the sort of place in which Bannon had been fired.
Trump next unleashed an attack on Afghanistan or someplace by dropping something called the mother of all bombs, or the mom bomb, or the mama bomba bomba bam by Richie Valence.
Leftists were outraged, saying the bomb was so expensive that the money should have been used to build shelters for all the little bombs who are now motherless.
Trump supporters were also angry because they had wanted the Trump administration to stay out of foreign wars until the wars metastasized into worldwide disasters that would engulf the earth in flames.
When told that was actually the Obama administration's policy, the Trump supporters descended on Berkeley to punch left-wing fascists so the day wouldn't be a total loss.
Kim Jong-un responded to the Berkeley riots by unleashing an attack that destroyed the entire known universe.
In the hellish, radioactive aftermath, Steve Bannon was fired, then returned to work.
So basically a pretty normal clavenless week.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this at last is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Shipsha-tipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
Blue Apron Basics00:02:48
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
One, what was I going for?
Like one week, one, maybe eight days, and you bring the world to the brink of nuclear war?
It's like, this is why we can't have nice things, you know?
All right, but I'm here now, and I'm here until Friday.
So it's Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
We will do shows.
Daily Wire was closed yesterday, and I spent Easter in England.
I'll talk a little bit about that.
That was kind of fun.
But first, we have to talk about Blue Apron.
You know, this is one of these commercials, one of these commercials where they offer free food.
They offer three meals for free, and somehow I have to sell this to you because that's my audience.
My audience is going, I don't have free food.
Anyway, but Blue Apron, it's great.
Look, I have tried it myself.
We have continued to subscribe to it again.
It basically sends you the ingredients, the perfect ingredients, and simple instructions on how to make excellent, excellent restaurant-level meals yourself in your own home.
So you get to sit there and cook with your wife or alone in a lonely, you know, half-drunken state.
But the food is really good.
It really is excellent.
It is all American stuff with 99%.
And it can be delivered to 99% of the continental U.S. 99%.
So it can get to you at your house anywhere you want.
Here are some of the upcoming meals.
This is the kind of stuff I'm sure you're not cooking now in your house.
But with Blue Apron, you can cook spinach and fresh mozzarella pizza with olives, bell peppers, and ricotta salad.
I mean, come on, this is good stuff.
Sweet and sour salmon with bok choy, carrot, and ginger fried rice, parmesan crusted chicken with creamy fettuccine and roasted broccoli, baby broccoli, and fontina paninis with hard-boiled egg and arugula salad.
It's really good stuff.
And the thing is, you know, you make it yourself.
It's about 10 bucks a meal, which is not expensive at all.
The ingredients are delivered to your house.
They give you this kind of chart, so it's very simple instructions.
Really good stuff.
And you can go and check out this week's menu and get your first three meals for free with free shipping.
If you go on blueapron.com slash Andrew.
I'm a little jet lagged.
You may notice, a little bit jet lagged.
But blueapron.com/slash Andrew, and you get three meals for free.
So that is a kind of good reason to check this out.
You'll love how good it feels and tastes to create incredible home-cooked meals with Blue Apron.
So don't wait.
BlueApron.com slash Andrew.
It's a better way to cook and a better way to eat as well.
Anyway, I come back and the place is falling apart.
People Following, Friends Vanish00:07:46
Bill O'Reilly, they say, is going to get fired.
I mean, this is still a sources say thing, but they say that Fox is basically, his ratings are soaring.
The guy's ratings are going through the roof.
Nobody cares except the sponsors.
And when sponsors start to pull out on you, people get nervous, right?
And the Murdoch through.
He has been, he was exposed, but the New York Times exposed that a number of women had sued him for sexual harassment in the workplace, and they had paid them off, basically.
They had settled this.
O'Reilly's lawyer is saying, no, this is all a left-wing setup.
I'm completely innocent.
And so that's where it stands.
Very tough, very tough to judge this stuff because it just sounds so real all the time.
When they say a powerful guy is picking on women in the workplace, it just sounds like that is really happening.
But we weren't there.
We can't know.
It would be really interesting if this story is true and he's gone.
I mean, you can't make excuses for it.
You've got to treat your fellow workers with respect.
I don't, because look at the people I work with.
But I mean, most people, most people are not.
I remember the first time I was on Greg Gutfeld's show on Red Eye.
I said to him, this place is like Bizarro High School because the smart guys get the pretty girls, which is not what happens in high school.
The smart guys get beaten up by the big guys in real high school.
But, you know, it may just be that people have gotten a little out of control there because there's certainly a lot of talk that the women are not being treated well and O'Reilly is supposed to have asked women out and then if they didn't respond, he wouldn't, you know, he basically shunned them and make it harder for them to promote.
Not a nice thing to do.
You know, it's like the old, there's an old Yiddish expression, I won't say it here, actually.
But what it means is don't bother the girls at work.
That's what it means.
So you'll have to ask Shapiro.
tell it to you in Yiddish because I can't do it and it'll be too filthy in English.
Well, the other thing that happened, oh, this is the thing that drives me crazy.
Now the Republicans are the people less likely to be bothered by adultery in their candidates.
As of 2016, for some reason, suddenly Republicans don't mind anymore if their political candidates are sleeping around.
People, you know, obviously they don't mind about Bill O'Reilly if this reports are true.
They're watching him and all this stuff.
So people are following the people.
They're not following the principles.
They're not following, things have gotten so partisan that even morality kind of goes down the drain.
So I'm watching politics from far away.
I go to England and it really, it really is interesting.
You know, you go, this is how I became a conservative in the first place.
You know, I lived in England for seven years.
And it was like watching, it was like that thing, that picture the astronauts took of the earth seen from the moon.
Remember that picture?
It's just suddenly you see this earth.
And that was what it was like.
Suddenly I saw America from very far away.
And it's funny in England because they love us, but they hate us.
We're kind of the new kid in town.
We're the child who grew up and became bigger than the mother country.
And they talk a lot.
The first time I was at a dinner party in England, somebody said, what is it with you Americans in a written constitution?
Why do you have to have a written constitution?
And I thought I was talking to a Nazi.
I thought, who does, you know, why wouldn't you have a written constitution?
But the thing about England is they've been there for a million years and they don't need a written constitution because they're English.
They know how to be free.
They invented freedom.
They invented modern freedom.
And it was shocking.
You know, I got to admit, I lived there in the 90s and I've been back since, but every time I go to London, I'm shocked by how few English people are left in London and how many of the women are wearing burqas and various Muslim garb and all that stuff.
And it's unnerving because in America, in America, if everybody is a different color, but they all adhere to the Constitution, it's still America, right?
But in England, if nobody is English, is it still England?
I mean, there is this kind of racial component there that we don't have.
I mean, the racist here, the alt-right faction who think that it's all about the color of your skin, they think we're all about race, but we're all about ideas.
I mean, it's ideas that govern things, and the ideas that govern things and the ideas of the English have been created by this culture.
And if that culture vanishes, will it remain?
You know, they don't, if it's not written down, will it remain?
So I was scanning, I was talking to everybody about all my friends.
I have all these friends over there, great people, and I wanted to know what they thought of Donald Trump.
And of course, they're all absolutely appalled by Trump.
I mean, my friends, wonderful people with artist types and, you know, kind of posh, middle class type people.
They call them middle class.
We would call them upper class because they speak in complete sentences.
But they're over there, they're just middle class.
Although I have one friend who's a baron, you know.
So I was just asking, and they were all just appalled.
He's appalling.
What did you do?
How have you done this?
So I said, okay, well, what's appalling about him?
What has he done?
Nothing.
It was just who he is.
It was just who he is.
And they would say, Obama, he was so wonderful.
He was one of us.
Obama was one of us.
And I said, yeah, he was one of us, in the sense that he was educated and classy and elegant and all that, but he was a terrible president.
He did a terrible, terrible job.
And Trump, this continues.
I was talking about this before I left.
It continues.
Trump is running this weird double presidency, this presidency where if you're looking at Trump himself, you're kind of thinking, I don't know, this guy, he is strange.
But then if you look at what he does, you know, I can't score him.
I mean, there are things, that thing when he called their Doyen, you know, in Turkey, they had this referendum, probably rigged, or Doyen gets dictatorial powers and Trump calls him up and congratulates him.
You know, like, congratulations, you're a dictator.
You know, all right.
Thank you very much.
I will kill everyone and jail all the journalists.
Good for you.
I'm so happy to hear it.
You know, so when he's talking, you hear this stuff.
When he bombed Syria, I'm on the plane.
I'm on the plane flying to England when he bombed Syria.
And first of all, I don't watch CNN a lot except to kind of pay attention to how bad they are.
But CNN was all they had of American news stations that you could get live on the plane.
I took them.
That station, forget about the bias.
That is the stupidest collection of human beings, with the exception of Jake Tapper.
If you put Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, is that his name?
And the blonde girl who works with Chris Cuomo, if you put their IQs together, you would get like one person.
I mean, they are so dumb, and the analysis they do is so ill-informed and so simplistic.
But I had to say, my entire feeling about this was, yeah, of course Trump bombed Syria.
I mean, this is what happens when a new president comes to town.
They test him, right?
The bad guys, the Russians, Vladimir Putin, who is just a thug and a murderer.
He's going to test him.
He's going to say, is he a paper tiger?
Is he a guy like Obama who never, you know, when he sets a red line, it suddenly vanishes.
You know, it doesn't matter.
Is he a weakling like Obama was?
Trump responded doing the exact right thing.
He was like, show him you're nuts.
Show him you're crazy.
I'll bomb anybody.
I'm nuts.
I'm Trump.
I just, you gassed those children.
My daughter didn't like it.
You're dead.
You know, that's the tone you want to set.
Because now Putin is thinking, maybe this is not such a good idea.
You know, I think maybe I will not do this next time because he doesn't know what Trump is going to do.
And then he dropped the bomb in Afghanistan, which I also thought was the right thing to do.
And Trump's followers, you know, I mean, conservatives are like this anyway.
Life Insurance Simplified00:03:55
Conservatives judge you on every single thing you do.
You know, it's not, they don't take the kind of shape of the administration and say, how's it going?
And Trump was a non-interventionist, right?
He told Obama, don't go into Syria.
He said, you know, he tweeted to Obama, you know, stay out of Syria.
What is America first, America first?
And you couldn't blame them.
I mean, like, I was listening to Ann Coulter.
We have Ann Coulter.
Yeah, play Ann Coulter.
This is her reaction.
She's like appalled that Trump is doing this stuff.
I like what Trump said during the campaign, which is it would be insane to go in and come out against Assad.
He's the one fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda.
We always go into these things.
We get nothing out of it.
We spend trillions of dollars.
Americans die.
Most of the rest of the world are savages, and we're always coming in at one point in the bar fight and propping up the loser at that one particular moment.
The whole point of the Trump campaign was America first, put America first, make America great again.
And what I really think you and I should be talking about right now, Lou, is the fact that anchor babies aren't citizens and they should be deported too.
And isn't that great that Trump is not printing work permits for the DREAMers anymore?
Oh, except he is.
We don't want to hear about the payloads and the topography of Syria.
Get these generals out of the picture.
I have to say, she just gets better looking.
Like, how does she do that?
She's just more and more attractive.
I can't disagree with her because she's so good looking, but I do disagree with her because I think this was what we had with the Obama administration.
We already know what it looks like when we have an isolationist policy, when we don't go into places, when we don't police the world, the world goes up and smoke, which is a good reason for you to get life insurance because let's face it, another few weeks of this, we're all going to die.
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And now we've got to say goodbye, right?
We've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
If you were subscribing to thedailywire.com, not only could you watch the whole show on the site, but we are now giving away for an annual subscription, a lousy eight bucks a month.
You get the movie The Arroyo.
You get the DVD of the Arroyo.
Come on.
This is good stuff.
All right.
Come on over to TheDailyWire.com and we'll continue talking about this.
So I'm watching from far away, right?
I'm in England and I'm watching our country from a long way away.
And I'm just seeing the same thing, this double thing that I can't explain to anybody, and nobody else is talking about it.
I mean, nobody is talking about the fact that Trump is doing a good job.
Trump's Surprising Syria Bombing00:04:28
After he bombed Syria, which was the right thing to do, and all his supporters didn't attack him.
And what happened to the Russia thing?
Suddenly, the Russia conspiracy is gone.
I go away for a week.
It just disappears.
It's almost as if it was just a dodge to distract people from the fact that Obama was spying on everybody, was spying on his political enemies through our intelligence agencies.
It was almost as if Trump was right when he said he was wiretapped.
I mean, the whole thing, you know, Trump just keeps saying stuff and they keep attacking him and attacking him and attacking him.
But it turns out to be right.
So now, you know, it is this weird thing.
John McCain, who never met a war he didn't like, right?
He just wants to go in everywhere.
It's like, kill him, kill him.
He said, we bombed Syria, but that's just the beginning.
I thought, really?
Could that be the end?
Could we bomb Syria and that would just be the end?
It was a good thing to do, but I don't want our guys parachuting into Syria or anything like this.
And McCain, this is what McCain says about it.
And I support what he did, and I support the bunker buster bomb, but we've got to develop a strategy.
There is still not an overall strategy that he can come to Congress and his advisors and say, okay, this is how we're going to handle Syria.
Here's how we're going to handle post-Mosul Iraq.
Here's how we've got to have a strategy and I'll give them some more time.
But so far, that strategy is not apparent.
But Trump's whole strategy is to not tell you his strategy.
That's his whole idea.
I mean, people were complaining that it was illegal for him to bomb Syria.
I don't believe that.
I mean, presidents have been bombing countries on the basis of approval from Congress that was already in the bag, and the law says they have to consult with Congress.
And he did.
He did consult with Congress before he did it.
But, you know, a Pulitzer Prize goes to the first columnist, the first person who says Trump did the right thing and then doesn't say but.
You know, I mean, I'm not talking about these guys who think everything Trump does is the right thing.
You know, everything Trump does is not the right thing.
Trump is undependable.
When he talks, I mean, his description, his description, he was having dessert with the Chinese president when he decided, when he gave the go-ahead to unleash the bombs on Syria.
And his description of this, you're sitting there like slipping under the table.
Play Trump's description of how he decided this.
I was sitting at the table.
We had finished dinner.
We're now having dessert.
And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen.
And President Xi was enjoying it.
And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded.
What do you do?
And we made a determination to do it.
So the missiles were on the way.
And I said, Mr. President, let me explain something to you.
This is during dessert.
We've just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable from hundreds of miles away.
All of which hit.
Unmanned.
It's so incredible.
It's brilliant.
It's genius.
Our technology, our equipment is better than anybody by a factor of five.
I mean, what we have in terms of technology, nobody can even come close to competing.
And our cake is unbelievable.
I mean, it's not just me saying this.
It's the best cake.
Everybody says it's the best cake.
So he goes on to explain to the Chinese president, you know, that he's done this.
And the president said, you know, okay, well, the guy gassed people, so I don't care.
But here's the thing.
You know, it's so early in this presidency still.
It's still so early in this presidency that the policy is taking shape.
You know, yes, he hasn't given the speech with the Trump doctrine, but so what?
You know, it's like it's give it, give the guy time.
He is a strange dude when he talks like that.
So help me, I shudder.
I think like, really?
You know, is that, did he really, was that the way, good cake?
Oh, yeah, and bomb Syria.
You know, but clearly he's listening to people who are cooler heads because he keeps doing stuff where you go like, yeah, that was basically the right thing to do.
I mean, it wasn't, you know, if he has no policy, if he's just going to launch a couple of bombs in there, eventually it's going to lead to trouble.
But for now, this is the thing.
You know, he keeps doing things where you want to say, oh, yes, but, but, but, but it was the right thing to do.
Elite vs. The People00:15:08
Put a period on it.
You know, Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella at newsbusters, I love this site newsbusters.
They did a survey on the first hundred days, the coverage, the press coverage in the first hundred days of this presidency.
Listen to this.
As President Trump approaches the end of his first 100 days in office, he has received by far the most hostile press treatment of any incoming American president, with the broadcast networks punishing him with coverage that has been 89% negative.
The networks largely ignored important national priorities such as jobs and the fight against ISIS in favor of a news agenda that has been dominated by anti-Trump controversies and which closely matches what would be expected from an opposition party.
For example, President Trump's push to invigorate the economy and bring back American jobs received a mere 18 minutes of coverage, less than 1% of all airtime devoted to the administration, while his moves to renegotiate various international trade deals resulted in less than 10 minutes of TV news airtimes.
Eight years ago, in contrast, the broadcast networks rewarded new president Barack Obama with mainly positive spin and spent hundreds of stories discussing the economic agenda of the incoming liberal administration.
And this is the thing.
You know, what the left doesn't realize is this is bad for them too, because it creates a fantasy world.
You know, you were watching that Georgia runoff election, the Georgia special election for Congress to replace Tom Price in Georgia, right?
If you watch the networks, this was a referendum on Trump.
Well, first of all, baloney.
No, it wasn't.
It wasn't a referendum on Trump.
Secondly, oh my gosh, the Democrat was the, he was the great hope of the world.
Listen to the network coverage of this.
Play the network coverage.
As voters here decide tonight, people on the blue team far away from Georgia are praying that this special election north of Atlanta turns into a revenge vote against the president.
President Trump embarrasses our country or acts recklessly.
I'll hold him accountable.
Carrying all that weight on his young shoulders is 30-year-old Democrat John Ossoff, a former congressional aide who finds himself leading in the polls in a crowded field that includes 11 Republicans.
Tonight, the eyes of the political world are on a congressional district in Georgia where an upstart Democrat is trying to win a special election in what has been a Republican-held district for years.
Democrats hoping to ride anti-Trump sentiment to victory, and the president himself apparently keeping a close watch.
NBC's Casey Hunt has details.
Voters in a deep red Georgia district heading to the polls today.
Hey, good morning, everybody.
Democrat John Ossoff seems to come out of nowhere to become his party's first best chance to take on Donald Trump.
Thank God for Trump.
But some traditionally Republican voters in this suburban Atlanta district just can't stomach the president.
He has brought, I think, the decorum of the presidency down so low that I cannot bring myself to support candidates like that anymore.
Democrats far beyond Georgia hoping this is just the beginning to energize their base of opposition.
I mean, come on, come on.
Of course, it turned out he didn't get the 50% he needed to just win it, so now it's a runoff, which almost certainly will go to the Republicans.
But the problem is, this is like Newt Gingrich's seat, you know, so that they were taken by surprise.
Democrats poured in the money.
They're just desperate for a win because the Democrats have been decimated.
You know, this is what you keep forgetting.
The Democrats have been absolutely destroyed.
Here's what I want to say that I saw while I was away.
I just wanted to get to this.
Most people, and I'm talking like 90% of people, are not paying attention to the news that closely.
They get an emotional sense of what's going on.
They hate Donald Trump in England because he's not one of us.
He's lower class and he talks funny and he looks like he's flying off, you know, off the handle.
It's really hard in this administration so far.
I read a lot of news.
I mean, I read a lot of stuff.
It is hard in this administration so far to tell what exactly is happening because of the split between the way Trump behaves.
He doesn't behave like a normal president, like our usual president, and the things he does, which have been pretty solid so far.
We've got a great new Supreme Court justice.
I mean, come on.
If people had told you, if two years ago, people had told most conservative commentators that we were going to get a great Supreme Court judge, that we were going to have, I think he's now signed 13 bills retracting Obama regulations and things like this.
The legislative policy has been slow, but it's kind of on the way.
It's kind of gearing up.
He's getting used to it.
He's learning stuff.
You know, come on.
If we had told it, we would have been celebrating in the streets.
It is too early for us to know this guy.
He is too offbeat.
He is too strange.
And he is still learning because he really is a neophyte.
He's a neophyte.
Part of this is a class war.
Part of this is sheer class anger.
And it's not just in England.
It's here too.
He is not one of us.
What my friend said about Obama, Obama was one of us.
Donald Trump is not one of us.
And when I say one of us, I mean the press, because the press are part of the elites.
It's not just Democrat-Republican.
It's also elite versus working class.
It is elite versus the people.
You know, the elites thought they were doing such a good job because they were.
They were doing such a good job for the elites.
Let me end this with this incredibly dishonest story in the New York Times, a former newspaper, right?
Here's a story that tells you that divorce is no longer on the rise.
This is what they said.
Divorce is no longer on the rise.
So it starts with somebody we can all identify.
All us New York Times readers can identify with Gwyneth Paltrow, right?
Because that's the person we most, you know, that's the person I wake up in the morning and think, I want to be like Gwyneth, you know?
So it starts, this is the lead.
When Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin consciously uncoupled this year, ABC News said it was the latest example of the out-of-control divorce rate, 50% and climbing.
When Fox News anchors were recently lamenting high poverty levels, one of them blamed the fact that the divorce rate is going up.
And when Bravo introduced its divorce reality show, Untying the Knot this summer, an executive at the network called it a way to look at a situation that 50% of married couples, unfortunately, end up in.
But here is the thing.
It is no longer true that the divorce rate is rising or that half of all marriages end in divorce.
It has not been true for some time, even though social sciences have tried to debunk those myths.
Somehow the conventional wisdom is held.
What follows is a bunch of junk about women's roles and how women are in the workplace and it's so much better when women are working and this and that, the whole feminist routine.
But as you get down deep into the story, it says the marriage trends aren't entirely happy ones.
They also happen to be a force behind rising economic and social inequality because the decline in divorce is concentrated among people with college degrees.
For the less educated, divorce rates are closer to those of the peak divorce years.
And some of the decline in divorce clearly stems from the fact that fewer people are getting married.
And some of the biggest declines in marriage have come among groups at risk for divorce.
In other words, the poor, the lower classes.
So what is happening now is the 60s came along and feminism came along and all the elites said to people, you don't need to get married.
Marriage is slavery.
Marriage is wrong.
Marriage is terrible.
The people, the ordinary people, took that advice.
Okay, you know, we'll have children out of wedlock.
Okay, we won't get married.
Okay, fine.
And then the rich people said, of course, we're going to get married because that's the best way to run your life.
You know, it's best not to go around cheating on people.
It's best not to go around having children out of wedlock.
We're not going to get divorced because it's economically unviable.
It makes you poor.
It's bad for you.
It's bad for your children.
We're not going to do that, but it's okay for you.
You know, Charles Murray writes about this in his book, Coming Apart.
What has happened is the elites have left the 60s behind, and in their wake, they have left behind a destroyed middle and lower class.
They have destroyed with their lousy values and their lousy moral example.
They've destroyed these people and they've left them out of work, addicted to OxyContin, with children out of wedlock, with marriages that don't stay.
And they've gone on.
They've moved on and they think things are going great.
They don't understand why Donald Trump, we were doing so well for us.
We were doing so well for us.
And they don't, they don't get it.
All right.
Stuff I like about Hitler.
That didn't come out right.
Wait a minute, that didn't come out right.
What I mean is I've got three days, so I'm going to talk about two films about Adolf Hitler that I really, really like.
And Hitler himself, I'm not so fond of.
I was not as fond of Hitler as like I would like.
We sat around, we talked, I said, Hitler, you know, stop, stop, just stop.
Downfall is this wonderful movie.
I guess I can't remember, 2004 or something like this, is based on Noachim Fest, one of the great historians inside Hitler's bunker, and another book called Until the Final Hour.
You know it because they keep making hilarious jokes out of this one scene where Hitler realizes that his armies are destroyed and he gets up and he starts screaming.
And we've all seen this.
They dub it now.
The picture's in German.
So they dub it with, you know, like the Patriots won the Super Bowl and, you know, whatever it is, Donald Trump won the election and Hitler starts screaming, Yavatara, and the people are weeping.
The movie itself is as powerful and cruel and difficult to watch as any film ever.
And one of the things it talks about is something that I think we're seeing now at a much less level.
Of course, we're not seeing anything like Hitler.
We're not seeing anything on that level whatsoever.
But we are seeing people who are devoting their best resources and their best values and their sense of honor to things that are not worthy of their sense of honor, to people who are not worthy of their sense of honor.
The right thing doesn't change because Donald Trump does something different.
It doesn't become right to cheat on your wife because Donald Trump bragged about it.
It doesn't become right to harass women at work because Bill O'Reilly does it.
You know, we don't change, we can't change our principles to attach them to human beings.
And that's what downfall is about.
It's about the last days of Hitler and what happens to these Germans who are acting on principles that we can all recognize as basically good, on principles of honor, on principles of loyalty, on principles of courage.
Tremendous courage is shown throughout the movie.
All of those things are attached to this gnome-like madman with a vision of complete insanity that he has sold to the entire world.
I mean, obviously Hitler was evil, but clearly the evil became something very much like insanity at some point when he was in complete denial.
The joke about that scene that they keep replaying as a comedy scene is that he was the only person who didn't know that he had no armies left.
I mean, in Berlin, the joke in Berlin at the end of the war used to be that you could walk from the Russian front to the Allied front.
You could walk across the city because that's how close the end of the war was, but Hitler didn't know.
So it's a beautiful, beautiful movie, but it is a movie about something that I feel is disturbingly close to us.
I don't want to judge Donald Trump because of the way he talks.
I don't want to judge him because of the stupid things that occasionally come out in his tweets.
I want to judge him on the things he does and on the things he says.
You know, we don't have a king.
And this is interesting because if we had a king who was in charge of our Constitution, if we had a king who every now and again said, nope, you can't do that.
That's not constitutional.
Nope, you can't do that.
That's not constitutional.
Then he would be our figurehead.
He would represent our country morally.
The president has always had to fulfill that role.
He's always had to fulfill two roles.
So it is a wonderful thing that Donald Trump wants to fix stuff that's broken.
I really admire him for this.
I think he is sincere in it.
I think he believes in it.
He is a complete and utter pragmatist.
If it's broken, he wants to fix it.
But pragmatism has its limits.
You need to have principles too so you know how you want to fix it.
Remember when Obama went to Cuba and he said, well, you have a little communism, you have a little capitalism, whatever works, whatever works, dude.
That's fine if you don't know what you want out of life.
If you know what you want, you want people to be free, then the communism, not so good.
You know, the socialism, not so good.
You want capitalism so people can be free.
So far, they keep calling Trump an authoritarian.
I haven't seen any authoritarianism from him whatsoever.
I mean, he's doing what he can do.
He's working with Congress.
He's talking to Congress.
I don't see him really doing anything that bothers me the way Obama did.
However, however, we cannot change our values to prop Trump up.
That's not the way forward.
What we have to do as conservatives, I'm not going to pick on Trump every time he does something I don't like.
You know, the call to a Doyen, you know, I wanted to slap him on top of the head.
But come on, you know, he's going to make mistakes.
He's going to do dopey things.
We get that already.
But I also do not want to sell out my principles for a man.
You know, I do not want to sell out what I believe to follow a guy, even when I think he's doing the right thing.
However, that said too, I just think we've got to let the guy live and breathe.
In two years, there's going to be a midterm election.
We are going to be fighting to keep the control of Congress.
He does deserve support for doing the right thing.
It is okay to say Trump did the right thing, period, and not put a butt on to show how much smarter you are than he is.
It's okay to praise him when he's right.
As I was far away, looking back at our country, I thought, you know, things are going much better right this minute than we have had any right to expect from this presidency, certainly than I expected.
Things are going better.
That they may not continue to go well, of course, that's true.
There are going to be crises ahead.
But the guy does deserve our support insofar as he does the right thing generally, you know?
And not as far as he does the right wrong and doesn't say the wrong thing.
Stick to the principles.
Stick to the, not just the principles, but also the human loyalty to freedom and liberty and the American way.
Watch Downfall.
It's a great movie.
It is a great movie.
And if you can get past laughing at this one scene that keeps coming up on YouTube all the time, it really is a beautiful film about people who hooked the right wagon to the wrong star.
And we want to make sure we're not doing that.
All right, we're going to talk.
World Back From Nuclear Brink00:00:20
We'll be back on Thursday and Friday.
We have great guests coming up on both Thursday and Friday.
We will try and bring the world back from the nuclear brink that you guys let it go.