Ep. 308 skewers Everyday Feminism’s Riley J. Dennis for framing lesbian penis preferences as "anti-trans," then pivots to James Comey’s 2016 testimony, where his July press conference—calling Clinton’s emails "reckless" but not criminal—undermined DOJ credibility amid Lynch-Clinton tensions. Heather McDonald counters BLM’s anti-police rhetoric, citing her Claremont blockade and arguing proactive policing saves black lives, while Drew Claven praises Trump’s Sessions-era reforms over Obama’s ignored black homicide spikes. The episode frames 2016 as a near-miss for free speech and law enforcement, contrasting it with the perceived chaos of a Clinton win. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time to get our knickers in a twist with a monthly visit to our favorite website, Everyday Feminism.
Everyday Feminism is the site where you don't have to fall out of a second story window and land on your head to know how it feels for your brains to turn to mush.
You just have to read the posts and you'll get the idea.
This month on Everyday Feminism, we find a video post that has been shared by over 21,000 people.
The post is entitled, and I swear this is real, Can having genital preferences for dating mean you're anti-trans?
The post is authored by Riley J. Dennis, who describes himself as a queer trans non-binary lesbian, which I think means a guy with long hair who'll put out for anybody.
The post begins with this urgent question, and again, this is a real quote.
Is it cis-sexist or anti-trans to say that you wouldn't date a woman who has a penis?
The answer is more complicated than you might think, unquote.
Well, since my answer is a wordless scream, it's possible Riley J. Dennis' answer is in fact more complicated.
Let's find out.
Riley J. Dennis begins by describing an issue that I know has been troubling many of you.
So what's been happening is that some people are making the argument that it's not cis-sexist at all to only be attracted to people with one kind of genitals.
For example, these people might argue that being attracted to only women with vaginas in no way negatively affects trans people.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, how am I ever going to unsee that guy?
But wait, there's more.
I'm not telling lesbians that they can't be lesbians.
If you're a woman who only likes women, go ahead, identify as a lesbian.
But some women have penises.
Well, I'm glad Riley J. Dennis is not telling lesbians they can't be lesbians, because I know lesbians were worried Riley J. Dennis might pass that law and make life harder for them in Riley J. Dennis' imagination, which is the one place where Riley J. Dennis' opinion matters.
Anyway, where were we?
Oh yeah, lesbians with penises.
Wait, aren't lesbians with penises basically just men?
Never mind.
Let's look a little deeper into this issue.
So if we look a little deeper into this issue, there's the possibility of your genital preferences being at least somewhat partially informed by growing up in a cis-sexist society.
There's also the fact that a preference is different than saying you would never do something.
Like having a preference for tall girls is fine, but refusing to date anyone under 5'7 is ridiculous.
So Riley J. Dennis thinks we should all date short girls with penises.
And what Riley J. Dennis thinks about who we should date is very important to Riley J. Dennis.
As for the rest of us, I think we should all visit Everyday Feminism from time to time to remind ourselves how lucky we are not to be the people at Everyday Feminism.
I think I need a drink.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Why Stamps.com Matters00:02:08
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, for those of you who went blind during the opening monologue, we apologize.
There's nothing we can do about it.
Heather McDonald is here, one of the best reporters in America, to talk about censorship and some of the stuff that has been happening to her on college campuses.
It's a very busy news day, and you know what that means?
It means we don't have time to wait online at the post office for crying out loud.
We're busy people.
We can't just go driving out and then find the post office closed and then come back and have to wait online.
And that is why there is stamps.com.
Stamps.com gives you everything, every single thing you would get at the post office in your computer except for the line.
You don't have to wait online to use your computer.
You just sit down at your computer.
You can get stamps, click, print, mail the letter, and you are finished.
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your computer.
You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer.
Stamps.com makes it easy.
They will send you a digital scale so you know exactly how much postage you need, and they'll even help you decide the best class of mail based on your needs.
You don't have to lease one of those expensive postage meters that you then drop on your foot.
All you do is put the envelope into your printer and it comes out with legal postage.
It's pretty amazing.
Right now, you can enjoy the stamp service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitments.
You'd go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N, stamps.com, and enter Clavin where the microphone is.
You will never have to go to the post office again.
Just use stamps.com.
Comey Hearing Impact00:15:04
Well, this is a big news.
As we're talking, there is talking about voting on the new health care reform.
We're not going to comment about it yet and find out what happens.
This is in the House, obviously.
It still has to go through the Senate.
Conservatives are going to scream and yell.
I think conservatives are going to be wrong.
I think this is actually a much, much more clever bill than conservatives think it is.
I know they're saying, oh, you promised to repeal it and it's not repealing it and now you own it and all this stuff.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
But we're going to wait and see if they pass it.
And then we'll talk about it on Monday for those of you who survived the Clavenless weekend.
You few, you happy few who survived the Clavenless weekend.
Trump was meeting with Mahmoud Abbas from the Palestinians.
This is the ritual of all American presidents, the optimism about solving the Palestinian-Israel wars, and then just before everything goes to crap.
That's how it gets a ritual.
They all have to do it.
Oh, yes, we're very, the peace process is back, and it's all going to be great, and then the killing starts again.
So we can wait for that.
That'll be good.
But you know, to me, the thing yesterday that really got me was that Comey hearing.
I was just happening as I was coming in yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to hear it, to really think about it.
I think that the press missed the headline on the Comey here.
I mean, I was looking, here's the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, what they wrote about it, right?
And it was basically all about Comey's letter, the October 28th letter, that Hillary Clinton blames for her losing the election, okay?
And, you know, the news media, I was in the news media a lot, especially back in the 80s, and that was when the news media changed.
That was when there were major cutbacks.
That was when they started to go for profit over just public service.
The old FCC idea was you made your profit on the entertainment shows, and then as a public obligation, you had a news program, and it wasn't supposed to be a profit center, and that was supposed to keep it clean and just deliver the information.
In the 80s, they started firing people and bringing people on to say, we've got to make a profit with our news department.
And that's when they started saying, you know, what you want to be talking about is sex.
You want to be talking about, you know, that boring old budget.
Don't talk about the boring old budget.
You know, let's get right to the condoms because that was during the AIDS crisis.
Let's, you know, They were being able suddenly to talk about sexual behaviors that no one had ever mentioned on air before.
This was a big thrill to some of the news directors.
I got on a lot of fights back in those days with my bosses and just saying this is a stupid cheapening of the news.
But when you fire all, when, on the one hand, you fire all your investigative reporting because investigative reporting is the most expensive thing because you pay these guys to go out and do these long-term stories and they don't really deliver for months and then suddenly you've got one story and it's over.
So you got rid of your investigative guys and the people who could still afford investigative reporters like the New York Times have become so politicized and corrupt that their own investigations disappear down the memory hole like when they did.
You know, if you went on the New York Times business page and read about the 2008 crash, you would have learned that much of it had to do with Democrat politicians like Barney Frank defending the corrupt and stupid practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and giving home loans to people who couldn't afford them, which Wall Street then abused by packaging these things and getting people to pay for it a thousand times.
And when all that collapsed, as George W. Bush was pleading with them to stop doing it, right, when all that collapsed, suddenly it was all Bush's fault, all the Republicans, all Wall Street.
We keep hearing Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street.
And Barney Frank, who should be, in my opinion, in prison, you know, wrote the bill that was now going to fix everything, the Dodd-Frank bill, which is ridiculous because Chris Dodd and Barney Frank had their hands in that collapse more than anybody.
So all I'm saying is the truth was in the New York Times, but the New York Times is so corrupt, they basically buried it on the business page.
You never would have heard of it.
You would never, the people who read the New York Times did not know what was in the New York Times because they bury it and they don't write about it on the op-ed page, which is the first thing everybody turns to.
So now you have Jim Comey get out here.
And it starts, the thing is, Hillary Clinton kind of directed the news attention to herself with this interview that she gave, blaming everybody but herself for her loss.
But I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28th and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off.
And the evidence for that intervening event is, I think, compelling, persuasive.
And so we overcame a lot in the campaign.
We overcame an enormous barrage of negativity, of false equivalency, and so much else.
But as Nate Silver, who doesn't work for me, he's an independent analyst, but one considered to be very reliable, has concluded: if the election met on October 27th, I'd be your president.
And it wasn't.
It was on October 28th, and there was just a lot of funny business going on around that.
And ask yourself this: within an hour or two of the Hollywood access tape being made public, the Russian theft of John Podesta's emails hit WikiLeaks.
What a coincidence.
I ran out of gas.
I had a flat clear.
I didn't have enough money for cab fare.
My touch didn't come back for the cleaners.
An old friend came in from out of town.
Someone stole my car.
There was an earthquake.
A terrible flood.
Marcus, it wasn't my fault.
I swear to God.
One of those was Hillary Clinton.
I'm not sure which, but it was all somebody else's fault.
But the big thing was that letter that Comey, now you remember what this was.
Comey had closed the investigation into Hillary Clinton's abuse of the private email server.
She hadn't been indicted, but now then he said, oh, we found more on Anthony Weiner's computer.
We found more emails.
I'm going to have to go.
And he wrote a letter to Congress telling them that he had to go and look at what this was.
And she feels that that's why she won, as opposed to the fact that she was a crappy candidate.
So now Comey gets up before the Senate and he says it was terrible, terrible thing that he had to do this, that he had to write this letter.
So this is cut five.
Look, this was terrible.
It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election.
But honestly, it wouldn't change the decision.
Everybody who disagrees with me has to come back to October 28th with me and stare at this and tell me what you would do.
Would you speak or would you conceal?
And I could be wrong, but we honestly made a decision between those two choices that even in hindsight, and this has been one of the world's most painful experiences, I would make the same decision.
See, now here's the thing, though.
It's not about going back to October 28th.
It's about going back to July 5th.
That was where protocol was completely shattered.
That was when he got up.
Comey got up and gave a press conference saying Hillary had done all this stuff wrong.
She'd been incredibly reckless.
She had done it, you know, every word she had said when she made that statement at the UN was a lie.
Everything she said was a lie, but there was no criminal intent.
Now, that was ridiculous.
Most lawyers would agree that that was not the rule, that, you know, if anybody else had done what she had done, they'd gone to prison.
But suddenly he says there's no criminal intent, and he took away what the Justice Department, what Loretta Lynch was supposed to do, the Attorney General, was to decide whether on the merits she should prosecute.
He said, no, no, no one would prosecute.
Forget about it.
So suddenly, that was where he made his mistake, right?
That's what made the October 28th letter necessary.
So let's find out.
Let's go back and look at why he did this.
And this, to me, was the headline right here.
This is number six.
The credibility and the integrity of the criminal justice process, that the American people believe it to be and that it be in fact fair, independent, and honest.
And so what I struggled with in the spring of last year was how do we credibly complete the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails if we conclude there's no case there.
The normal way to do it would be to have the Department of Justice announce it.
And I struggled as we got closer to the end of it.
A number of things had gone on, some of which I can't talk about yet, that made me worry that the department leadership could not credibly complete the investigation and decline prosecution without grievous damage to the American people's confidence in the justice system.
And then the capper was, and I'm not picking on the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, who I like very much, but her meeting with President Clinton on that airplane was the capper for me.
And I then said, you know what?
The department cannot by itself credibly end this.
The best chance we have as a justice system is if I do something I never imagined before, step away from them and tell the American people, look, here's what the FBI did, here's what we found, here's what we think.
And that that offered us the best chance of the American people believing in the system, that it was done in a credible way.
That was a hard call for me to make to call the Attorney General that morning and say, I'm about to do a press conference and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to say.
And I said to her, I hope someday you'll understand why I think I have to do this.
But look, I wasn't loving this.
I knew this would be disastrous for me personally, but I thought this is the best way to protect these institutions that we care so much about.
And having done that, and then having testified repeatedly under oath, we're done, this was done in a credible way, there's no there there, that when the Anthony Weiner thing landed on me on October 27th and there was a huge, this is what people forget, new step to be taken, we may be finding the golden missing emails that would change this case.
If I were not to speak about that, it would be a disastrous, catastrophic concealment.
There is the head of the FBI telling the Senate that he came out, first of all, he's a total drama queen, so I'm not letting him off the hook.
I'll get back to that in a minute.
This is not about letting Comey off the hook.
There is the head of the FBI telling the Senate that he came out and gave that press conference because he did not believe Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General and her Justice Department, was credible, that the people would believe it.
He said things had happened that he couldn't talk about.
And then there was, of course, the famous meeting between Loretta Lynch, blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton that just completely exploded her credibility.
He felt he had to come out because basically the Attorney General was not trustworthy.
The Justice Department was not trustworthy.
Now, I call him a drama queen because the right thing to do in that situation is to resign.
The right thing to do is to resign and blow the whistle and come out and say, look, I can't prosecute this case fairly.
I cannot do what needs to be done because the Justice Department is protecting a political candidate.
And so here, Chuck Grassley questions him about this, pegging this question off a story in the New York Times.
The New York Times recently reported that the FBI had found a troubling email among the ones the Russians hacked from Democrat operatives.
The email reportedly provided assurances that Attorney General Lynch would protect Secretary Clinton by making sure the FBI investigation, quote, unquote, didn't go too far.
How and when did you first learn of this document?
Also, who sent it and who received it?
That's not a question I can answer in this forum, Mr. Chairman, because it would call for a classified response.
I have briefed the leadership of the intelligence committees on that particular issue, but I can't talk about it here.
You can expect me to follow up with you on that point.
Sure.
You can cut it there.
It goes on and on with Comey saying he's not going to talk about whether there was an email saying that was hacked by WikiLeaks saying that Loretta Lynch was going to protect Hillary Clinton and keep this investigation from going too far.
What was exposed yesterday, the narrative that was exposed yesterday, was a drama queen FBI guy reacting to an attorney general and a justice department under the Obama administration so corrupt that he couldn't do his job.
He didn't react in the right way.
But Hillary Clinton is essentially complaining that she lost the election because she was so corrupt that the FBI dropped the ball on how corrupt she was.
I mean, that was the story.
That was the story.
And I think if there were still investigative reporters, that would be the story they were covering.
All right, have we got Heather?
We do.
Excellent.
Heather McDonald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, where she has covered a range of topics, including higher education, immigration, homelessness, policing, and criminal justice reform and race relations.
As I have said a million times, I think Heather is one of the very few of the best reporters in this country.
If she were a leftist, she would have a stack of Pulitzer Prizes on her desk.
Her newest book is The New York Times bestseller, The War on Cops, which I read.
I thought it was a deeply important book, really worth reading.
That was in 2016, and it's about basically about the fact that Black Lives Matter has got it all wrong.
How you doing, Heather?
Thanks for having me on, Drew, and thank you for those kind words.
I greatly appreciate it.
No, it's all true, and I've said it for years.
I'm glad the bestseller list finally reflects it.
Yeah, well, the Times is not too happy, I'm sure.
Well, I noticed.
I mean, it is incredible to me.
You are one of the few reporters who goes out into the street to get this story, who really goes and gets, and you're never on mainstream TV.
They never turn to you, even as a dissenting voice, to say, you know, here's Black Lives Matter on one side, here's Heather on the other.
They never do it.
Well, after the five Dallas officers were assassinated in July last year, CNN toyed with having me on Saturday, the day after, and then canceled.
Of course, of course.
I mean, you cannot have a more concrete demonstration of the fact that they are simply unwilling to listen to the other side.
Well, speaking of that, recently you were out here in California and you went to Pomona and UCLA.
And I think this story got a little swept away and all the kind of drama at Berkeley, which was also definitely interesting.
But could you describe, especially the Pomona experience?
Because it's, I mean, shocking is an overused word, but it's shocking.
Can you describe what happened when you went, first of all, you went to speak about the Black Lives Matter war on cops issue.
Was that what you were there for?
Yes, I was there to talk about my book and to make my argument that there's no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that Black Lives Matter than the police.
The day before I got to Claremont McKenna, I got an email from one of the administrators saying they'd gotten wind of protest and were looking to move my talk to a building with fewer plate glass windows and better means of egress.
Building Troubles00:03:32
So that was a little bit worrisome.
When I did arrive, they said, well, we haven't heard any more about these protests, so we're keeping it in the original building known as the Athenaeum.
I was put into a safe house for about two hours during which I, with the blinds drawn, during which I heard the chanting growing louder and louder and the drumming, I saw a petite blonde woman walk by with her face covered in a Palestinian headscarf, of course, and a big battery pack on her back like a jetpack to amplify her bullhorn.
There was what appeared to be a lookout posted on the maybe a football field away on my looking over into my balcony.
I didn't see what was happening, however.
That was outside my range of vision.
What I learned later was that the building, the Athenaeum, was being blockaded by about 250 to 300 students who prevented anybody from entering, whether it's their fellow students or professors.
They made very short shrift of the police efforts at protecting the entrances.
They completely ignored the barricades the officers had put up.
The cops stood by, let them take over the building.
So all of the events that had been planned for me to talk to students beforehand, the dinner, all went out the window.
I addressed a large empty auditorium.
They moved the podium away from the visual range of the windows because they were worried that when night fell and the podium became lit up, that it would be visible to the outside people who were banging on the windows.
So I gave my talk to an empty room.
The people that were in it were basically police officers.
It was disconcerting because they were glued to what was happening outside.
The windows, which I could hear, which again was people banging on the windows and chanting.
I took two questions from a live-streamed audience, and then the cops decided that they could no longer guarantee my safety.
And so the QA was peremptorily shut down and an escape plan was planned out the kitchen.
So I was quickly hustled out through a group of students perched on some stairs and put into a police van and we sped away to the Claremont Police Department.
Unbelievable.
And now, has anybody, has any action been taken about this?
Has the administration of the college done anything, any disciplinary action at all?
Nothing that I'm aware of yet.
The president said he was planning to do so.
I suppose there's a certain amount of due process for once, these being protesters and not alleged male heterosexual male rapists.
So I don't know what the normal, a reasonable expectation is to see whether President Chodosh is true to his word or not.
I frankly, in this case, will not be surprised if he does levy some sort of punishment because this event has been a real black eye for Claremont McKenna.
The Heart of the Protest Letter00:11:54
I mean, you wrote a piece that I thought was sensational in City Journal about a letter that some of the black protesters who called themselves We Few, I was happy to hear like Henry Ve Few.
But what you said about this letter, I thought, got to the heart of it.
First, can you describe what their argument was?
Oh, please, Andrew, no.
It's not.
There is no.
There is no argument.
It consists of garbled high theory.
And if I can't read it literally, it cannot be summarized.
I mean, you have to read this stuff.
It is a parody of academic discourse that today substitutes for thinking.
To the extent they had an argument, it was potted, rehashed, Michel Foucault claiming that the Enlightenment is responsible for the concept of truth, and somehow truth is oppressive, and even more so, free speech is oppressive.
They claim that the Enlightenment is responsible for racism, patriarchy, colonialism, feminism.
What has to be understood, and the other thing that I say about theirs, is that their writing is simply abysmal.
They cannot construct sentences.
They have no sense of what grammar or syntax or usage is.
And these are students, some of the co-signatories are graduating this year.
This shows what is going on in college campuses, especially for minority students, because nobody dares correct their writing.
They've been brought in under double standards, you know, to their misfortune, because nobody is helped by preferences that bring you into an academic environment that you're not prepared to operate in.
But the other thing is that their history is so ignorant.
You know, it is facile.
It consists only of labels without knowledge behind it.
And for them to charge that free speech is oppression, leaving aside their ignorance of the Enlightenment, and we know for sure that they've never read Voltaire or Diderot or Kant or Hume, for them to say that free speech is oppression ignores the fact that free speech was essential to getting rid of slavery, as Frederick Douglass himself wrote in 1860 in a plea for free speech,
saying slavery cannot survive free speech.
It was essential to the civil rights movement.
So the one thing that you would think with black studies in college and the American high school curriculum being taken over exclusively by the black story that they would understand is the importance of the First Amendment to liberating minorities in this country, and yet they're ignorant even of that.
And you know, your point about the grammar of this letter, which I thought was really well made in your article, it's not a small point.
It is not a small point that these kids have gone through college ignorant of history, ignorant of the English language, incapable of writing a letter with an argument in it.
I mean, that's a major, major failure of the professors, the academics at this institution.
I mean, that is a terrible thing to have done to them.
But let's move on to the actual meat of what you're saying.
What did you go to say that made you such a danger to these people that they would resort to violence?
I mean, you seem like a perfectly nice person.
What was the heart of what you were going to say to them?
I said that there is enormous support for the police.
What I prefaced my remarks was, I said, for the last two hours, I've been hearing chants that Black Lives Matter.
And of course, I don't know if you get censored on this.
Should I say F the police?
I don't know if you bleep out the police.
We bleep out those.
Yes, we do.
And of course, hey, hey, ho, ho, Heather Mack has got to go.
And from Palestinian to this, from something to the sea, Palestinians must be free.
But what I said was, I've been hearing about Black Lives Matter.
I hope that you therefore were just as upset when Aaron Shannon Jr., a five-year-old boy in south central Los Angeles, was shot to death in his Spider-Man costume on Halloween in 2010 by a Kitchen Crips gang member.
I hope that you were equally upset when Tyson Lee in 2015 November in Chicago was lured into an alley with the promise of candy by his father's gang enemies and assassinated in cold blood.
The original plan had been to cut off Tyshan's fingers and send them to his mother.
The killers of Tyshan escaped with the body in the trunk and dumped it in Indiana.
Not a single Black Lives Matter protester showed up at that event.
But I said the people who did care about it were the police.
They worked their hearts out day and night to bring that killer to justice.
The father himself refused to cooperate with the police in identifying his son's killers, typical of gang members and the no-snitch ethic of the inner city.
And I went on to say, if any of you had had any loved one lost to gun violence, the first thing you would do is call the police, and the second thing you would do is ask, why is that thug, why was he still on the streets?
Because he would inevitably have had a long criminal record and yet, contrary to the myth of mass incarceration, would be out on the streets free to kill again.
You know, it makes a weird kind of sense when they write a letter saying that objectivity is not a real thing, the truth is not a real thing, that only leaves the story that's being told.
It makes perfect sense that they have to silence you because you're bringing facts that ruin their narrative, and there is a weird, horrible logic to it.
Let me ask you one more question before I let you go.
And I don't want to put you on the spot politically because I know you're not that kind of journalist, but clearly the Obama administration was guilty of exacerbating this problem of casting the police in a terrible light.
How do you feel things are going now?
Is this an improvement?
Is what's happening now an improvement for the police or staying the same?
Or how do you feel about it?
No, it's an enormous improvement.
Trump got it right.
He said there's a false narrative about the police.
He pledged to restore law and order during the campaign.
He was the only person who pointed to the rising black homicide toll thanks to the Black Lives Matter narrative and the fact that cops are now backing off of proactive policing in inner cities.
And amazingly, this shows you how perverse our racial rhetoric is.
When Trump said that black parents have the same right to be able to walk their child to school without fear that that child will be shot as white parents do, he was denounced as a racist.
President Obama dismissed the rising black homicide, told we had the largest one-year increase in homicides in 2015 in nearly 50 years.
Overwhelmingly, the victims were black.
900 more black males were killed in 2015 compared to the previous year.
Obama said, not to worry, Trump's exaggerating.
It's just a blip in a few cities.
In other words, Black Lives Matter don't matter when they haven't been taken by a police officer.
Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, is doing great things.
He wants to review federal consent decrees for police departments, which are grotesquely unnecessary, wildly expensive, and take officers off the streets to write endless reports for this overpaid, ignorant federal monitor.
So, no, I have big hopes that at least the narrative coming out of the White House will change and that that will, I hope, remoralize the cops.
Heather McDonald, excellent reporter.
The War on Cops, a terrific book.
It's great to see you, and I hope you'll come back and we'll talk some more.
Thanks, Drew.
I appreciate it so much.
Oh, I see.
You know, I got to stop here and just talk for just a minute about the rhetoric on the right, okay?
Because I get it.
The budget recently was kind of stinky.
You know, we're not going to get a repeal of Obamacare, which is an absurd hope.
The fact that people thought that they were just going to repeal Obamacare and send these congressmen back.
You know, they're not all from southern states.
They're not all from hyper-conservative states.
Some of these guys are from moderate, you know, a lot of these guys are from moderate states.
They can't go back and tell people, oh yeah, you lost insurance, but we promised to repeal it.
So, you know, now you can't pay for your kid's health care.
They're not going to go back and do that.
It's politics.
There's compromises.
I know it sticks in the right's craw.
Reality sometimes sticks in the craw of commentators who don't have to wrangle cats up on Capitol Hill.
But the difference between this government and the last government and the government we didn't have, that we would have had if we had elected Hillary Clinton, is a difference, an unbelievable difference.
The fact that our police are getting support, the fact that Jeff Sessions is pulling off, as Heather said, that Jeff Sessions is pulling off those federal guys who know nothing about police work.
They only know about racial grievances.
And we keep talking about Neil Gorsuch, but I've been reading recently some of the theories on the left of left-wing Supreme Court justices like Breyer about the First Amendment and what it means.
They don't believe in free speech.
They do not believe in free speech.
I'm not exaggerating.
They believe that, oh yeah, the First Amendment is supposed to protect the environment in which we can speak.
It's not supposed to protect necessarily what Heather McDonald is saying because that doesn't preserve the environment.
We dodged a bullet the size of a 50-50 shell.
And I don't care what anybody says.
I understand that we have to complain.
I understand that we have to ride the Congress.
There's nothing wrong with putting pressure on the Congress to move it to the right, all this stuff.
But to sit and think that this is not such a so much better than what we would have had is insane.
And so while you're complaining and while you're grousing about the latest thing, just remember, just remember, that bullet was the size of a tank bullet and we dodged it.
And Trump is basically, you know, like I said, like I said, we'll see how he does in the legislative arena.
We will see.
I will talk about the health care bill, assuming it gets through the House.
I'll talk about that on Monday if anybody survives the Clavenless weekend, which I know is always a near-run thing.
But I just think that while we're complaining, it is not the wrong thing to say that at least we have a guy in office, at least we have a Congress now that does think about the lives of black people because I care a lot more.
I care a lot more about that little kid in his Spider-Man outfit who was proudly showing it off, who got blown away by a gang member, than I care about the gang member who gets shot down by the police, even if the cop made a mistake.
This is absurd.
We have moved into a world of absolute illogic.
The guy we started with talking from the everyday feminism, whether it's that guy with their sexual insanity or these Black Lives Matter guys essentially attacking the one group that cares about whether they live or die, that protects the safety of their neighborhoods, and that has been integrated and changed to answer some of the true grievances that they had about a couple of decades ago.
Caring More About Innocence00:03:57
You know, it's insane.
And at least this president, like, he does things that I would have had hair by now if this guy would just be quiet sometimes.
You know, he sometimes drives me crazy, but it is better.
It is better and much better than it would have been or than it has been for the last eight years.
And while we're complaining, we ought to take a little time to celebrate that.
Stuff I like as we go into the week.
This is a double stuff I like because this is, you know, I've said this before, I know, but I'm like one of the only people I know who listens to music in the movies because some of the music in the movies is the best there is.
And I always tell this story about chariots of fire.
I went before it opened with my wife and I walked out and I said, great score.
And she said, what score?
You know, because who listens to the music in the movies?
And of course, that became one of the most famous scores ever.
But here is a film, first of all, that you probably haven't seen, and it is worth seeing.
It's called The Molly McGuire's.
It's a 1970 film based by, directed by Martin Ritt, who was an excellent director.
It had Richard Harris and Sean Connery, so it has a fantastic cast in it and has Samantha Egger, who is one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived.
I was so madly in love with her when she was at her prime, which she is in the Molly Maguires.
And it's a terrific story, based on a true story, set in 19th century Pennsylvania.
And it talks about a coal mining, basically they're kind of union terrorists trying to overcome the abuses of coal miners.
And the detective who was sent in to infiltrate them, it's based on a true story.
It's really good.
The score is by the great Henry Mancini, who did so many scores.
I can't even add Pink Panther, you know, Moon River is his.
I mean, he just has so many scores.
And the theme song is great, but I'm not going to play the theme song.
Buried in this for about, it's literally there for 15 seconds, is a love theme of such heart-melting beauty that it got me.
I was like, it comes and goes in 15-second love scene between, I think it's Richard Harris and Samantha Egger, and it's played in the background, but it's stuck in my head forever.
And of course, now we have everything online.
Here is the love theme from the Molly Maguires, and then we'll come back and say goodbye.
Great stuff.
Henry Mancini, the love theme to the Molly McGuire's, and the picture is good too.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
Run for your lives.
Survivors gather here at the DailyWire.com on Monday.