Ep. 304 dissects Trump’s first 100 days—mixed executive wins (Gorsuch, Syria strikes) amid GOP legislative failures—while Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch argues Trump’s immigration bans (blocked by courts) are justified, framing Islamic violence as Quranic doctrine rather than extremism. He demands prosecution for Sharia-advocating crimes like FGM and honor killings under U.S. law, citing polygamy rulings as precedent, before the host pivots to Muhammad Ali’s draft refusal, questioning its "heroic" framing. The episode blends policy critique with cultural jabs—mocking airline chaos, healthcare comparisons to slavery, and jazz tributes—ending with a satirical farewell. [Automatically generated summary]
Several airlines are re-examining their practices after a recent incident on a United Airlines jet.
United Airlines overbooked the flight and offered $1,000 to any passenger who would give up his ticket.
When no one did, the airline randomly selected a passenger and had the police drag him from the plane, smashing his face into the armrests as they went.
The passenger was then taken out on the tarmac and shot to death, and his head was later stuck on a pike and set outside the United check-in desk with a sign that read, next time, take the $1,000.
United CEO Oscar Desad later issued a statement defending the airline's actions, saying that beating and killing passengers was a much cheaper form of in-flight entertainment than those annoying little TVs in the backs of the seats.
It's nearly impossible to hear movie dialogue over the jet engines, Desaud said, whereas nothing says entertainment like watching your fellow passenger's body bounce around in the aisle as he's being dragged away in handcuffs.
Desad later apologized for his statement, saying, quote, I was just kidding.
And if you don't think it's funny, our flight attendants will be happy to kick the crap out of you.
No, I'm kidding.
And if you can't take a joke, we may have to shove a bag of tasteless pretzels down your throat.
No, I'm kidding, unquote.
Unwilling to let United outdo them in the public relations department, American Airlines soon entered the competition for best customer service.
A recent video, I'm not making this up, a recent video taken by a passenger shows an American flight attendant ripping a stroller out of the hands of a sobbing mother who is holding two children.
Witnesses say the flight attendant hit the mother with the stroller as he was grabbing it and narrowly missed hitting one of the babies.
When a male passenger tried to defend the mother, the flight attendant offered to fight him.
American says the flight attendant's behavior is part of a new service the airline is providing to cut down on the number of annoying babies on flights.
American says the babies tend to cry and irritate the other passengers, and the airline feels that by brutalizing the children's mothers, they'll send a message to babies to stay away if they know what's good for them.
The airline statement said, and this is a real quote, the actions of our team member do not appear to reflect patience or empathy, unquote.
It's not clear whether the lack of patience and empathy refers to the part where the attendant clocked the sobbing mom with the stroller as she tearfully begged him to give the stroller back, or when he later served a passenger a boxed lunch containing a sponge cake that tasted like a bunch of lint held together with paste.
In the aftermath of these two incidents, American and United are discussing whether to merge their companies into one enormous collection of empty planes that no one ever flies on again.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is ticky-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is a bibby's in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
Tax Reform Wants00:14:41
All right, the last day before the Clavenless weekend, a shorter Clavenless weekend begins, but we have Robert Spencer here.
Robert Spencer, this is not Richard Spencer.
I keep mixing him up.
Richard Spencer is the Nazi.
Robert Spencer is one of the foremost experts on jihad and Islam.
He is the director of Jihad Watch, which is over at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
I really like Bob because he's one of the nicest people around, very mild-mannered, but what he does takes so much courage to say the things he says, and he's just very direct, and he really knows his stuff.
So we're going to talk to him.
We're going to stay on Facebook so you can watch the interview.
But you might want to come over to thedailywire.com and subscribe because then you can be in the mailbag next week.
And also, if you subscribe for a year, it's only a lousy eight bucks a month.
Come on, what's wrong with you?
subscribe for a year, we will send you a free copy of The Arroyo, excellent film about the border troubles, and we'll send it to you for free on DVD for a year's subscription.
All right, Scott Adams, you know, the Dilbert guy, the guy who does the Dilbert cartoons in the newspaper.
Scott Adams has become one of the most interesting observers of the Trump administration.
He doesn't really deal with policy.
What he does is he deals with Trump as a businessman, as a guy who likes to convince people.
And he had a funny column on his blog where he says, everyone observing politics seems to agree on two things about a president's first hundred days in office.
One, 100 days is a meaningless, arbitrary marker for a president's performance that is likely to be more misleading than useful.
And two, let's treat it like it's important.
That's basically what we're going to do today.
100 days, 100 days is a totally phony deadline.
You know, it started with FDR because Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to deal with the Depression, to deal with the crash.
And the special session of Congress lasted 100 days.
And that is what they're talking about.
Nowadays, if you judged 100 days by how much Congress works, it would last for, I think, six years because they take every other day off.
So the first thing I want to start with is this interview that Reuters did with Trump.
This is a genuinely touching interview where Trump talks about his feelings about it.
Just listen to what he says.
Well, I loved my previous life.
I loved my previous life.
I had so many things going.
I actually, this is more work than in my previous life.
I thought it would be easier.
I thought it was more of a, I'm a details-oriented person, I think you would say that.
But I do miss my old life.
I like to work, so that's not a problem.
But this is actually more work.
And while I had very little privacy in my old life, because, you know, I've been famous for a long time, I really, this is much less privacy than I've ever seen before.
I mean, this is, you know, something that's really amazing.
At the same time, you're really into your own little cocoon because you have such massive protection that you really can't go anywhere.
Yeah, I mean, I used to like, I was able to go out to restaurants, and even though people knew who I was, I like to what?
You like to drive.
Yeah, I like to drive.
I can't drive anymore.
It's kind of touching.
I mean, you can make fun of him, you know, like I didn't know the job of being president of the United States was going to be hard.
It's kind of like a reality star didn't realize there was actual reality, you know, like that's like reality.
There's reality TV and then there's reality.
You know, it's like he didn't notice that.
He just sounds to me like the dog who caught the car, though.
You know, like he thought, like, I could be president.
Like, whoa, you know.
So as a result of this, I mean, obviously, people are picking on Trump.
You know, obviously the left is picking on him.
I'll talk about that in a sec.
But everybody's sort of saying, well, he hasn't done all the things he said he was going to do.
And of course, he made a totally unrealistic list of things that he was going to do.
And plus, he's had to become, he's had to drop some of the rhetoric that he uses.
You know, he went in with China and he was going to declare that they were currency manipulators.
And then he sits down with the Chinese president and he says, can you give me some help with North Korea?
Because these people are nuts and they're going to blow us all to Kingdom Come.
And like, then maybe it's not so good to call the guy a currency manipulator when you need help in something really serious like this, even though China is a currency manipulator.
And just, you know, the way he's dealt with his staff, you know, it's not that Steve Bannon is gone.
The press is constantly firing Steve Bannon.
But Steve Bennett's still there.
He's just kind of keeping these guys back.
Kellyanne Conway, and he's put Jared Kushner, who's more of a sort of presentable centrist face.
I mean, I said when Trump got elected that I thought he was going to be an okay, middle-of-the-road Democrat president, basically.
You know, not a leftist like Obama, but still kind of a Democrat presidency.
So far, you know, if you take, obviously, Neil Gorsuch, no Democrat would have appointed him and the attack on regulations, which is something very near and dear to my heart.
Here's Karl Rove talking about the accomplishments of the first 100 days.
He says he recruited an impressive cabinet, especially in the foreign policy and national security areas.
And this is another thing.
I mean, not to just blow my own word, but the thing I was right about is Rex Tillerson has been absolutely great.
He was on with Brett Baer last night, gave a long interview.
Just he was humble.
He was straightforward.
He said he understood that running a company was not the same thing as dealing with matters of life and death.
You know, Trump himself, Trump himself seems humbled by the office.
And this is one of the things, you know, Shapiro and I, the night, Ben Shapiro and I, the night he got elected, Shapiro said, well, you know, power has never been good for anybody.
It's never improved anybody.
And I said, the other side of that, which is, you know, it's true, power doesn't improve people most of the time, but the other side of that is the gravity of the office has frequently lifted people to a higher level.
Even Obama, who I really thought was the worst president of my lifetime, even he started to understand that he was dealing with something that was a little bit almost bigger than himself.
Almost.
He almost started to realize it was bigger than himself.
But Trump has realized that.
And the, I forgot the guy, his name, Ruddy from Newsmax, who's a pal of Trump, said that after the Syria bombing, you know, he kind of congratulated Trump on how well it went.
And Trump was very solemn about it.
You know, he didn't brag about it.
He understood that people die in these things.
And, you know, sometimes it's some innocent guy who's just walking by who dies.
And even though you have to fight wars, it's not a pretty thing.
More from Rove.
He said his spectacular Supreme Court nominee was confirmed, and Mr. Trump greenlighted the Keystone XL and Dakota access pipelines.
You forget these things because they kind of come and go.
He took action against Syria, adopted a surprisingly tough line on Russia, and held positive meetings with world leaders.
Mr. Trump froze hiring of many federal workers, required rescinding two regulations of equal cost for every new rule created, signed laws repealing last-minute Obama regulations that cost the economy billions.
The stock market is up around 14% since election day, and consumers are far more confident than they've been in years.
Mr. Trump also points to nixing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and issuing dozens of executive orders, browbeating Ford and Carrier to keep jobs in America and slowing illegal immigration.
Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy again, says most of the problems with the Trump administration are imaginary.
What Adams' point is, is that there's nothing to compare Trump's 100 days to because no one has ever had the situations that he has.
You can find similar things, but it's always different, so there's no scientific basis on which to compare anything.
But Scott Adams says he has all these imaginary problems.
He has imagined problems on his tax returns.
Imagine blackmail by Russia.
Imagine poor performance based on imagining a control case of another imaginary president doing the same job at the same time, but doing it faster.
Imaginary belief that doing things you prefer he not do is similar to not being competent.
Imagine staff problems that are bigger than they are.
Imagine nuclear holocaust that happens because of Trump's imaginary insanity.
You know, if you redrudge, we have all been killed by North Korea like 15 times in the last couple of weeks.
Imagine problems caused by his ignoring of facts that don't matter.
Imagine future climate calamity.
They could be right, but for now it is imaginary because complex models have a bad track record.
The one thing, of course, that we have to point out is the lack of substantial legislation.
And that's the thing that, you know, you can blame Trump for this.
And obviously a president's job is to lead and to inspire and to guide the Congress.
But there is genuinely something wrong with the Republicans in Congress right now.
They are not getting the picture.
First of all, a lot of them don't like Trump.
Remember, Trump took over their party, and he was not the guy any of them wanted.
And they're not inspired to help him out, you know.
But if they would put their country first, I mean, if I were in this situation, and I think Paul Ryan has tried to do this, but he hasn't been effective so far.
If I were in this situation, what I would do is I would sit down with the guys and say, look, let's say Trump is bad at convincing the Congress to do what he wants.
Let's say that's the case.
I would sit down with the Congress and say, look, this is us.
We have to do this.
We have to deliver for the president because otherwise we are going to betray our country and lose our seats.
You know, this is kind of what Paul Ryan was saying.
He was saying that, like, we owe the people this.
Here is Paul Ryan talking about the promises they made.
I think people's seats are at risk if we don't do what we said we would do.
We all campaigned on repealing and replacing this law that is collapsing.
The American health care system in the individual market is in peril right now.
We have a moral obligation to prevent people from getting hurt, to stop damage from being continued.
And we promised that we would do this.
If you violate your promise, if you commit the sin of hypocrisy in politics, that's the greater risk, I think, to a person's seat.
So, you know, that's exactly right.
And I think that that's what these guys have to find out.
And I'm not like singling out the Freedom Caucus, the conservatives or the moderates and all this.
They now say they now got a new compromise on health care.
And I'll talk about this another time.
I really like this compromise on health care, though not for some of the reasons you think.
It's got something to make everybody angry, but it gives states a chance to opt out.
And since Obamacare is collapsing, I think a lot of states are going to do that.
I think it's an actual brilliant compromise.
Mark Meadows, the head of the Freedom Caucus, says he thinks they've got the votes to get this through.
It's not necessarily a more conservative bill, but it is a bill that lowers premiums for the American people, allows us to hopefully get on to tax reform in a very quick fashion in the coming days.
So I want to be clear here.
The votes are there from the House Freedom Caucus as well as the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
No, actually, I'm not the whip for the entire GOP conference, and so I appreciate you clarifying that.
Certainly from the House Freedom Caucus, we took an official position, which means more than 80% of our members are on board.
Actually, it's a little bit more than that.
And so based on a previous whip count, as long as we don't have any more defections, I think that we will be there.
So if that happens, and then he can move on to his, he's got this massive new tax reform bill, which I really like as well, because it's not just a tax cut, which Republicans are always very good at doing.
It's a genuine reform of the tax system, the first one we've had since Reagan.
It is deeply, deeply necessary.
Conservatives are complaining that he hasn't got wall funding because the Democrats are threatening to shut down Congress and, of course, shut down the government.
Of course, whenever the government gets shut down, it's the Republicans' fault in the press.
So the Republicans are very shy of having that happen.
And Trump seems to be giving way on getting funding for the wall right now.
The funny thing about the wall is, you know, he really has cut back on illegal immigration just by enforcing the laws we have.
He has cut back on illegal immigration.
I doubt a wall is going to make much difference.
I doubt it is.
Most people don't care whether he builds a wall, but he did say it every single day of his campaign, and people like Ann Coulter are really hammering away at it.
And it is symbolic at this point of his getting stuff done.
The one thing I just want to mention, and then we're going to bring on Robert Spencer from GHOTWatch, but the one thing I really want to mention is that the press, the first 100 days of the Trump administration of the press, the press has covered itself in shame.
They have disgraced themselves.
If it were possible to disgrace themselves, in order to disgrace yourself, you have to have some grace.
The press, the media basically threw away all its grace, all its credibility, not covering the scandals of the Obama administration, not giving Obama a fair coverage, but basically hagiographizing him, turning him into a saint.
And now they've just unleashed against Trump in a way that it just makes them, they're liars.
They're just liars.
It's a constant lying.
If you don't believe me, I have to play this.
This is CBS.
This is not, this is a news story, okay?
Trump came out with his tax reform plan, and it's very, very difficult to parse how tax reform is going to play out.
You know, it really takes a lot of mathematics to figure out who's going to be affected how, and things don't go the way you seem.
The New York Times headline, which they later changed as they always do, they disappear their headline.
But their first headline was something like, I'm talking from memory, but it was, you know, Trump issues new tax reform plan that will help the wealthiest.
You know, that's what it'll do.
Here is CBS.
This guy, Scott Pelley, or Ted Baxter, as I call him, from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Scott Pelley, this is his lead-in, and this is not an editorial.
This is his lead-in to Trump's tax reform.
Today, the Trump administration rushed out a plan for historic tax cuts, high on hyperbole, but with only a dollop of detail.
The list of aspirations looked more like an attempt to beat the 100-day mark in the Trump presidency rather than a serious proposal to reform the tax code.
On paper, everyone's in for a break: personal income taxes, corporate taxes, savings for the rich and the dead, but nothing on how to implement it or pay for it.
Far from legislation, the president's bullet points today were loaded into a starting gun that signals the beginning of a race of lobbyists and special interests to rewrite America's 70,000-page tax code.
Wow.
I mean, you know, it's like, hey, Scott, nobody asked your opinion.
It's like, report the news.
You know, people are turning these people on to get the news.
Scott Pelley is betraying.
And the thing is, the guy is Ted Baxter.
He's got the silver hair.
Religion vs. Reality00:14:00
He's got the deep voice.
He's an idiot.
I just got to replay this cut of Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the classic Scott Pelley newsman.
State Line, Washington.
The Gatewater case is in the news.
Make that the Casewatergate.
And my incredible sources tell me exclusively that we'll continue to keep our eye on the latest developments there.
Elsewhere around the nation, more weather heading our way.
And some especially good news for residents of our area.
Despite the tornado watch and severe hurricane warning, today's pollution index was only six.
Six.
That's six, of course.
Six is on a scale of one to seven, and that's the same scale we use at home at our Baxters at home when we're back on our Weight Watchers.
Speaking of the trouble in South America, here's a special report via satellite from special correspondent Muck Racker.
Muck?
That's Scott Pelley or Ted Baxter.
I can't.
You never see the two of them together at the same time.
So they may be the same person.
This, by the way, this stuff with Trump is the total opposite of the way Obama was greeted during his first 100 days.
John Hayward at Breitbart lists the ways.
It's worth taking a look.
Time magazine dubbed the Obama administration a historic presidency at the top of its 100-day special.
Coverage then brought in Joe Klein to declare Obama's start the most impressive of any president since FDR.
Mark Halperin gushed that Obama was instantly comfortable and highly skilled at the hardest job in the world.
Halperin faulted Obama only for a handful of public missteps.
Comparisons to FDR were ubiquitous in Obama's 100 days coverage.
So, you know, Trump has been swimming upstream.
I have said repeatedly that he is a man who learns things, which I think is really impressive.
And I'm still willing to give him a chance.
He is so much better than I feared he would be.
I was wrong in my predictions of disaster, and I'm just delighted to say it.
More to come, so we will find out.
If it really is up to the GOP, it really is up to Congress now how this goes.
And if they just insist on not doing their jobs because they dislike Trump, they'll be like the guy who poisons himself hoping somebody else will die because they're the ones who will go down.
Maybe as well as Trump, but they will certainly go down.
All right, let's bring on Robert Spencer.
He is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Harwitz Freedom Center.
He's the author of 16 books, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades and the Truth About Muhammad.
His latest book is The Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran.
And coming in this year is The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech and Its Enemies.
So I guess, Robert, you're going to be writing about Berkeley and our universities, I guess.
It's all in there.
All right.
It's good to see you, by the way.
Yeah, I like that.
I was pointing out that I think you are a courageous fellow, and you always do it with a great deal of good humor, and you always seem so easygoing.
But I never like to sit too close to you because I'm always afraid.
So let me ask you, I mean, you have been just steadfast in not letting people forget about the jihad, not letting people forget about America's enemies, people committed to destroying us.
You've seen Trump elected.
How are you feeling about the first 100 days in regard to the fight against jihad?
Well, it's like night and day from Obama, like you were saying about the other issues.
Obviously, Trump is trying to do something in the first place about domestic jihad attacks by limiting immigration from jihadi hotspots.
And he's been stymied in that, but you can't fault him for doing for that.
That's something that comes from these leftist activist judges.
What's interesting about both of the blocks on his executive orders is that despite the manifest realities that the executive orders were dealing with, they just brushed them all aside.
There are 72 jihadis who have been convicted of jihad activity from the countries listed in the ban, and they claimed that there wasn't any significant jihad threat from those countries.
There is very specific U.S. law giving the president the responsibility and the right and the authority to limit immigration for any reason.
And neither one of the blocks on his executive orders even mentioned that law.
This is raw judicial dictatorship.
They were not interpreting the law.
They were not deciding whether or not his executive orders were in accord with the law.
They were ignoring the law and legislating their own leftist agenda.
Well, let me ask you this then.
I mean, obviously, I agree with all that, but what about his actions, you know, in Syria, his actions with Iran?
Do you think that he is handling the actual Middle East wars in a better way than Obama was?
I'll tell you, Andrew, I was very concerned when he bombed the Assad airbase.
And it's not because I don't know that Assad is a scoundrel, but you got to ask the old Leninist question.
Who benefits?
The beneficiary, if you take out Assad, is going to be the al-Qaeda groups that Obama was backing to his everlasting shame and ISIS, the Islamic State.
The Russians are backing Assad because they realize that.
And there's just no good guy in this game.
Now, at the same time, having said all that, you also have to grant that behind Assad is Iran.
And Trump has very strongly put Iran on notice.
And so we've got to deal with the twin threats of Iran and ISIS.
And he's got to navigate that very carefully.
And he hit the ISIS base in Afghanistan right after he hit Assad.
So it looks to me like he's trying to deal with both sides of the situation.
You know, I was just in Oberlin, you know, this very, very liberal college, and I was giving a speech.
And one of the things that I said was that there's no such thing as Islamophobia.
I was just pointing out that nobody is phobic about, you know, there's nobody in America who suddenly has an irrational fear of Islam that just came out of the air.
That didn't happen.
And they were very upset that I said this.
The kids were just really, they really thought this was bad.
There was a story the other day out of just a minor story, but out of London that Katie Spencer, this TV personality there, tweeted about some jihadi and she made some remark and everybody attacked her.
This idea that somehow jihad is our fault, okay?
Well, let me start with this.
Let me start with this question.
Is jihad an existential threat to us?
I mean, every day I see about North Korea, is jihad an existential threat?
Certainly, absolutely.
Just like North Korea, ISIS has repeatedly called upon Muslims in the West to commit jihad attacks, jihad massacres against American civilians, British civilians, French, and so on.
They have called upon Muslims to do this, and they have been obeyed.
There have been numerous Muslims, including Omar Mateen, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, the Pulse Nightclub mass murderer who killed 49 people there and wounded another 53, many others, the San Bernardino killers, who said they were doing it in obedience to the call of ISIS.
And the idea here is not just to sow undifferentiated mayhem, but to overwhelm our law enforcement apparatus.
They can't keep track of all the plots and will ultimately collapse.
That might seem far-fetched, but actually we have seen it again and again now that there's a jihadi and then we hear, yes, he was known to authorities, but they weren't tracking him because they had other people they thought were scarier that they were dealing with.
Is the problem here?
It seems to me the great question of the day, and I know you have a very definite opinion about this, but the great question of the day seems to me: is the problem Islam, or is this a cancer on the face of Islam?
Is the violence inherent in Islamic religion?
Obviously, we're not saying all Islamic people are violent, but is the violence inherent in Islamic religion, or is it a cancer growing on the religion for other reasons?
There are key distinctions that have to be made for that, Andrew.
One is the one you just made between Muslims and Islam.
What Islam teaches is one thing, but how every Muslim puts it into practice is another.
Jesus says, turn the other cheek and love your enemies.
That doesn't mean that every Christian is a sweetheart.
And it's the same thing in Islam.
In Islam, it says, kill them wherever you find them three times in the Quran.
It says, wage war against the people of the book, that's Jews and Christians, until they pay the jizya attacks with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.
It says, when you meet the unbelievers, strike the next, that is, behead them.
And so these things are in the Quran, and this is the unalterable, perfect word of Allah that is valid for all time.
This doesn't mean every Muslim is going to carry that out, but that's not a cancer on Islam.
That is Islam itself.
Okay, then why is it?
What is this thing with Westerners?
And this happened in Oberlin, and it's happening in London with this girl, Katie Spencer.
What is this urge?
While I was talking, somebody started shouting out, you know, the problem is our imperialism, not their religion.
Well, let me divide this into two questions.
First, obviously, we have done things that have helped jihad.
Like our relationship with Saudi Arabia, I think, has sometimes been beneficial to the jihadis.
Oh, yeah.
So we have a role.
We have played a role in this.
It's fair to say we have played a role in exacerbating this problem, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
But the jihad is a lot older than the United States of America.
And it's not, there was no Byzantine imperial imperialism against Arabia.
The Byzantines weren't interested in Arabia.
The Persians weren't invading Arabia.
Nobody was bothering them.
And they came out of Arabia and conquered all of the Middle East and North Africa and had an empire stretching from Spain to India within 100 years.
None of those places that were conquered in those jihads had been threatening the Muslims or invading Islamic lands.
So what is it with Westerners?
Why do Westerners immediately look to blame themselves?
Why when somebody tweets about a terrorist and gets angry and she said something like, and Ramadan hasn't even started yet, wait till he's hungry, then he'll really get mean.
And people just piled on her, called, they reported her to the police and all this stuff.
What is it with the West that we blame ourselves for their bad philosophy?
Well, you know, Muslim advocacy groups in the U.S. and in Britain, most of which are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, they have very skillfully played the victim card.
They have played upon the West's traumas.
The worst sin in the United States is racism, and that's from our national history.
And people are deathly afraid of being charged with racism.
So Muslims have come in and very skillfully, even though Islam is not a race, portrayed any criticism of Islam or even of jihad terror as some kind of racist bigotry.
And they have cowed the left into going along with that because that is the cardinal sin that everybody wants to avoid.
Well, that's a brilliant answer.
I asked a tough question.
That was a good answer.
Looking forward, what are the solutions?
I remember when I was at our friend David Horowitz, one of his gatherings, Geert Wilders was there, and he was talking, and I was sitting next to Michael Barone, and Wilders said, you know, we should stop them from building mosques.
And I remember Barone, who tends to kind of murmur to himself, going, wait, we can't do that.
You know, we have a constitution that protects freedom of religion and freedom of worship.
What solutions do you see?
I mean, what do you see?
Nobody is willing to crack down on religion in America, unless, of course, it's the Christian religion.
But what solutions do you see for the United States that don't violate our commitment to free religion?
Well, absolutely.
We have to remember that the Constitution grants the freedom of religion, but the Constitution grants the freedom of religion in order to protect and defend the United States, not giving people an excuse for treason and sedition.
It's not some sort of license to break all other American laws and then claim the freedom of religion as your excuse.
The freedom of religion ends where other laws begin.
And there's precedent for this.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1890 said that Utah would not be allowed to become a state unless the Latter-day Saints outlawed polygamy.
And this was a matter of their religious freedom, but there was a compelling national interest that was considered of that.
And it would seem to me the same way here.
Muslims are perfectly free to practice their religion, pray to Allah, read the Quran, consider Muhammad a prophet, and so on.
But that does not give them a license to perform female genital mutilation, honor killing, jihad warfare, any of the things that are mandated in the Quran and Islamic teaching that are at variance with American law.
So you wouldn't stop the practice of Islam.
What you would stop is simply the crimes that you feel grow out of Islam.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, absolutely.
And when a preacher is preaching that Sharia has to replace the U.S. Constitution, as is preached in many American mosques today, as surveys have shown, then that has to be understood as frankly seditious and prosecuted accordingly.
Interesting.
Okay, well, Robert, I hope you'll come back and talk as the Trump administration continues and we can talk about his strategies.
Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Upcoming, is it out yet?
The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech?
Is that out yet?
July 27th.
All right, the Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran is already out, and the Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech and Its Enemies from Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, which you can, that's jihadwatch.org.
JihadWatch.org.
Okay, great.
Thanks a lot, Robert.
It's good to see you, and I'll talk to you again.
All right.
That guy is very sharp, and he knows like every word in the Quran and every, you know, period.
Song in Healthcare System00:05:57
And like I said, we do them by remote because we're all afraid of dying by standing too close to it.
All right.
Speaking of Islam, by the way, in the Wall Street Journal today, my pal Paul Beston has a spectacular piece in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page about Muhammad Ali.
And it really turned my head because I did not know this about Ali.
He talks about why he refused to go to Vietnam, why he refused the draft.
And that, of course, has been sort of depicted as this heroic decision standing up against the Vietnam War.
And Paul Beston is writing a book about boxing, and he comes out with the truth.
And it's very well documented and detailed.
And I won't tell you about it because I think you should just go read it.
It's in the Wall Street Journal.
As I am coming into stuff I like, yesterday, you know, one of the things about the right, conservatives, that I've been complaining about now for quite a long time is our failure to engage in the culture.
And I love to see the fact that as right-wingers are coming up, the young right-wingers are coming up, they are developing.
I saw this at Oberlin with the conservatives and libertarians there.
They're developing this impish, trollish sense of humor that is starting to bleed out, and it's absolutely terrific.
Yesterday, this was the biggest laugh I had yesterday, a place called Freedom Tombs, all right, put out a cartoon about Ben Shapiro talking to the way Ben talks to liberals on college campuses.
This thing had me in stitches.
Just play the whole thing.
It's really funny.
So you've supported this really racist idea that healthcare should not be for free.
And I just wanted to ask about that.
Okay, so here's how this works, gang.
Honestly, if you can't see that a universal healthcare system is bad for America, you're wasting my time.
Okay.
Okay, folks.
So the healthcare cost crisis didn't actually begin until the government got involved by creating Medicare and Medicaid because when you artificially stimulate demand, there's no incentive to lower price.
Not to mention, you are not entitled to the product of somebody else's labor.
That's called slavery, gang.
Okay.
This is what would actually happen under a universal healthcare system.
Here's what a single payer healthcare system would actually do.
Okay, folks.
It would actually make doctors literal slaves who would have to live in cabins on a plantation somewhere.
All right, folks.
And the idea, and the idea that doctors are just your slaves who you can, you know, marry without their consent and then make half doctor, half regular people babies with, okay, well, then what happens to the babies?
Are they now doctors?
Are they slave doctors who have to be doctors?
Are they free?
Now what, King?
Okay, so that's why that system would just never work.
But I should just get health care.
I should just get it for free.
And that's how you talk to a leftist.
At the end, if you can't see it, at the end if you can't see it, the red rays just blast out of Shapiro's eyes and just destroy the guy.
And by the way, you know, it's a cartoon, but that was a real event.
That actually does actually can do that.
Actually, I can shoot those rays out of his eyes.
I just love that.
It was really, really funny.
All right, stuff I like.
A shout out.
Today's last end of the week stuff I like is exactly the same as the stuff I liked before because last week I played a song that I just love, an old song called Angelika.
And I heard it from these guys who opened for Bill Cosby a million years ago and I had not been able to find them.
And I have to shout out to listener Alex Smith.
About three people, only three people, came up with this, but Alex Smith came up with it first.
Found these people, the Pear Extraordinaire, and I sent Alex a copy of my book, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I gave him a choice between that and Werewolf Cop, and he took that.
But I was really grateful.
I looked for these guys for over a year.
And like, I'm a good internet guy, you know, I can find things on the internet.
I could not for the life of me find them.
And they're not available in some of their stuff, it is in CD.
One or two of their pieces are in CD.
But this particular album with Angelika on it is not, you can't get it anyway, but in vinyl.
And they were two guys who it was just a vocalist and a bass player.
That's all it was.
And Carl Mathis Craig was the vocalist.
He died in 2012.
He became an actor and he did good works in Dallas running a scholarship for kids interested in the arts.
The bass player was A. Marcus Hemphill, and he became, went on to become a New York playwright and TV writer.
And he actually wrote for the Bill Cosby show after opening for Cosby.
But both of them teamed up, they were both from Texas, I think, and they teamed up to become the Pear Extraordinaire.
And they were a popular jazz duo.
And they performed in Greenwich Village and they recorded several albums.
And they were opened for Bill Cosby and Bill Dana.
Nobody remembers Bill Dana, but he was a big comedian in the time and appeared on Dean Martin's and Danny Kay's television shows on stage in Las Vegas.
And they were just spectacular.
They really were good.
And you can hear the thing that I love about their rendition about Angelica, which nobody else gets this, including last week, I think we played the guy who wrote the song and he didn't get it.
The song is overdramatic.
It's like a very, very sentimental, big song.
And so they play it down and they just kind of sing it in a very naturalistic way and kind of play into the jazz of it.
And it really is beautiful.
It's kind of a heartbreaking song and very, very touching the way they do it.
The Pear Extraordinaire.
And thank you to listener Alex Smith for finding it.
This is the end of our week.
A little bit of a weird week for me, flying around and everything, but the 100 Days of Donald Trump comes on a Clavenless weekend.
That can't be good, right?
But if you survive the Clavenless weekend, come back here and we will talk all about it on Monday.
We will be here and we have a full Clavin week ahead.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Have the best possible Clavenless weekend you can.
And survivors gather here on Monday.
Tomorrow's Promise00:01:07
Each night I meant to say I missed her through the day, but I forget it.
I never said it.
I passed the flower shop.
Lord knows I meant to stop.
But I'd say tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow.
Tomorrow there'd be time.
There'd always be another spring.
Time to make her life a ring.
Time to give her everything.
Oh, my Angelika.
My Angelika, there's so much you never knew.
So much I always meant to say and do for you, for you.