Ep. 310 dissects media bias through Trump’s firing of Sally Yates, exposing CBS’s "explosive" Russia claims as baseless while ignoring unfilled federal roles under his administration. Mona Charon critiques Trump’s moral tone—like comparing U.S. killings to Putin’s—while warning conservative tribalism undermines policy wins like Gorsuch’s nomination. The episode ties partisan media narratives (e.g., Macron vs. Clinton email coverage) to broader erosion of American exceptionalism, contrasting biblical purpose with modern nihilism in culture. [Automatically generated summary]
If there's one thing mainstream media journalists agree on, it's that Donald Trump presents a danger to mainstream media journalism.
A Google search of the words Trump is a danger to journalism produces over 500,000 articles, including a series in the LA Times on the quote unique danger Trump poses to journalism, a CNN editorial on Trump's quote dangerous war on journalism, a New York Times article on Trump's quote dangerous attacks on the press.
And that's as far as I got before I was distracted by a sidebar about embarrassing things that happened to cheerleaders.
But let's take a closer look at the whole Trump journalism thing.
During the administration of Barack Pajama, whatever his name was, it's hard to remember now that his legacy is a smoking pile of ash on the smoking ash heap of the history of smoking ashes.
But during the last administration, President What's His Face tried to prosecute a journalist for espionage.
He wiretapped the Associated Press, stonewalled Freedom of Information Act requests, bullied and berated journalistic outlets over critical stories, and caused even CNN's Brian Stelter to call the Osama White House the quote least transparent ever.
After which Stelter stole a pair of the then president's underpants to keep as a cherished souvenir.
So after eight years of abuse from President Bahama, why does President Trump present such a unique danger to journalists?
The president of CNN, a major Democrat donor, expressed his fears in an opinion column for the Daily Worker, writing, quote, Trump has ceaselessly attacked the media as bias toward Democrats, which has interfered with the public's constitutional right to know how the Nazis and the Republican Party are causing large numbers of poor minority children to starve in the streets while Republicans laugh over the champagne and roast suckling pig dinner they serve at their whites-only golf clubs.
Clearly, Trump's relentless attacks on press freedom are chilling to our attempts to destroy him, unquote.
ABC's chief political correspondent and former Clinton campaign hack George Sukalopikis, in a speech before the Association of Journalistic Deception, said, quote, personally, I find the Trump administration's constant drumbeat of fake news, fake news, fake news, very distracting when I'm busy trying to make up the news.
The creative process is delicate and requires an atmosphere of passive Republican acquiescence to slander for us to fulfill our constitutional role as creators of fantastical left-wing narratives such as Avatar and our evening newscast, unquote.
The president of CBS News, who was also the brother of an Obama aide, added his opinion in an interview given while he was covering a riot at Berkeley.
Quote, Trump must be silenced or there can be no free speech, unquote.
At least I think that's what he said.
It was hard to hear him through the balaclava.
So, I think it's now clear why Donald Trump presents a danger to mainstream journalism.
Not enough of a danger to get them to stop lying.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Post Office Prowess00:02:55
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-donkey.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
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Oh, hoorah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
It is Tuesday, and all the people of the earth know what that means.
It means tomorrow is mailbag day.
So subscribe.
Here's what you have to do.
Here are the steps.
Subscribe to thedailywire.com, send in your lousy eight bucks, and then you get to ask any question you want.
Ask the question that is hampering your life from being everything it could possibly be.
I will then answer that question and life will blossom like a beautiful lotus flower.
Something like that.
Anyway, today, however, we have syndicated columnist Mona Charon, one of the nicest people in the conservative movement, and I wanted to bring her on because she's a never-Trumper, and I wanted to find out where a person of integrity and intelligence stands.
And since we don't have any people like that here, we have to bring someone in from outside.
All right, so I just want to look at the news.
Oh, before I do that, I have to talk about stamps.com.
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That doesn't work for me, you know?
So that's why you use stamps.com because stamps.com essentially brings the glory of the post office right into your computer.
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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.
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Sally Warned About Flynn00:15:43
All right, I want to look at this story that happened yesterday just to show you how the media creates fake news.
I mean, you could watch every single step of it.
You know, the New York Times this morning had an op-ed in reaction to the French election, right?
It's by David Leonhardt.
He was filling in for David Brooks.
And it was called A French Lesson for the American Media.
Now, during the French election, Macron's emails were hacked, right?
And the French press essentially just did not cover it.
So here he writes, the hacked emails from Emmanuel Macron's French campaign appear to be spectacularly mundane, according to people who have read them.
So he doesn't know, but according to people who have read them, they're mundane.
They include briefings on issues, personal exchanges, and discussions of the weather.
No doubt they also include some embarrassing thoughts, but so far they are notably lacking in scandal.
Does this description remind you of anything?
Ah, yes.
Last year, Russian agents stole thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign and published them via WikiLeaks.
The dominant feature of the emails, according to David Leonhardt, was their ordinariness.
Despite the mundane quality of the Clinton emails, the media covered them as a profound revelation.
The tone often suggested a big investigative scoop, but there was no scoop.
It was material stolen by a hostile foreign government, posted for all to see.
And it was only occasionally revealing.
It deserves some coverage, but far less.
The overhyped coverage of the hacked emails was the media's worst mistake in 2016, one sure to be repeated if not properly understood.
Television was the biggest offender, but print media was hardly blameless.
The sensationalism exacerbated a second problem with the coverage, the obsession with Clinton's private email server.
In other words, why didn't we cover up for Hillary Clinton?
Why did we let these embarrassing news stories get out?
Can you imagine him saying we covered too many embarrassing moments of Donald Trump?
Why did we cover when Donald Trump said, oh, when you're a celebrity, women will let you do things.
Everybody knows that's true.
Why did we even cover it?
Why, you know, that's the New York Times op-ed tomorrow.
You know, it was like, why didn't we cover up for our candidate?
That's essentially what he's asking.
We have to learn from the French.
Cover up for your candidates.
Now, what's touching about this, what is so touching about this, is it's like a guy who doesn't understand that his pants have fallen down.
He does not understand that nobody cares what the New York Times covers anymore.
The internet would have covered it for them, and they would have just looked like they were doing exactly what they were doing.
And the second thing is, the reason you don't do that is because you're all Democrats.
You're all Democrats.
You have no way of telling what's important.
You have no way of judging what's important.
You have no one next to you that you can turn to and say, excuse me, as a conservative Republican working at the New York Times, do you think this is a big story?
Would you cover this?
You don't have that person there because you're all Democrats, okay?
So, Sally Yates, remember the acting, she is the acting Attorney General, an Obama appointee, who was fired.
Now, remember this, because this is important.
She was fired by Donald Trump because she refused to implement his travel restrictions, okay?
She said, I'm not going to do this, as if somehow she had the right to make that call, which she didn't.
She should have just done it or resigned, but she didn't do either.
She just defied him.
She was fired.
Okay.
So she went to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had warned the Trump administration that Michael Flynn may have done something wrong and had lied to Vice President Mike Pence, who we now just call Minch.
We've just strung his, we like Mike Pence so much, we've just strung his name together into Minch.
But the thing is, we don't know what any of this was.
We know that Michael Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador, nothing wrong with that, and he was going to be the, he was appointed the national security advisor, right?
And we know that he said that he didn't discuss with the Russian ambassador anything about the sanctions that Obama had put on the Russians to punish them for their email hacks, okay?
But we don't know what he said.
Nobody has told us what he said.
So for all we know, he mentioned it offhandedly and forgot about it and didn't actually lie to Pence, but just actually forgot about it.
That's a possibility.
I'm not saying that's what happened.
I'm just saying that's all we know.
We don't know anything about this, okay?
So now she goes before Yates, the former attorney general, acting attorney general, goes before the Senate and says that she's going to tell them, which we already knew, that she had warned them.
This is how they found out that Pence was lied to.
And then 18 days after this warning, Flynn was fired.
Now let's listen to CBS.
This is cut four.
This is CBS prepping this before it happens.
Possibly the most, this would be the most dishonest 30 seconds of television you've ever heard if you hadn't heard everything else that's on CBS.
So listen to the way they prep this.
Testimony on Capitol Hill today could reveal explosive new details about the alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Former acting attorney general Sally Yates will appear before a Senate committee.
Sally Yates was an Obama administration holdover and a key figure in the Russia investigation.
She was fired soon after warning the White House about then National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's conversations with Russian officials.
Okay, so it's going to be explosive.
First of all, they haven't heard it, but it's going to be explosive.
But listen to what she said.
She said she was fired shortly after warning Michael Flynn, warning the Trump administration about Michael Flynn.
She was fired shortly after, I mean, the suggestion, it's a clear suggestion that she was fired for warning them about Michael Flynn, which is just an outright lie.
Okay, so this is CBS.
This is a big, big network, right?
So now Trump tries to turn the tide using his favorite thing, which is Twitter.
And he says, ask Sally Yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to the White House counsel.
Now, this is the only crime that we know has been committed.
The only crime that we know has been committed is the leaking of Michael Flynn's name off what was supposed to be a redacted communication with the Russian.
with the Russian ambassador, right?
That was supposed to be masked.
They unmasked Michael Flynn's name and then leaked it to the Washington Post.
They leaked this story to the Washington Post.
That's the only crime.
That's a federal crime.
It's the only crime that we know has been committed.
So Trump, fighting back against this kind of dishonesty, oh, he fired Sally Yates because she warned him about this, tweets this.
Here's CNN covering the tweet.
This is what CNN thinks about this tweet.
He's the president of the United States, and the former acting attorney general is about to testify under oath before the United States Congress.
And you tweet, ask Sally Yates under oath if she knows how classified information got into the newspapers soon after she explained it to the White House counsel.
I started before I got covering politics all the time.
I used to cover the courts a lot.
A lawyer would call that witness intimidation.
Completely.
From the President of the United States, look, I think that we have all been kind of desensitized in some way to his tweets and to his statements that are so out of the norm.
This is beyond out of the norm.
This is inappropriate.
For the President of the United States to be this aggressive with somebody who used to work for him, who was coming before the United States Congress and sworn testimony hours later is beyond the pale.
It just is.
And you can ask, look, we saw this.
We've seen this in the Comey hearings.
We've seen this in other hearings.
The White House can send word up to its Republican friends on Capitol Hill, make sure you push her on this, make sure you push her on that.
But to go public like this is striking.
It's witness intimidation, like a gangster.
The man is like a gangster.
He's like a witness.
He's like Joe Pesci.
He's intimidating the witnesses.
He's not intimidating her.
He's fighting back against you guys, against John King and Dana Bash and the people over at CBS.
He's fighting back against you.
He's not trying to do anything to her.
He's just trying to get around you because you lie because you're all Democrats.
I mean, it's just they don't see that, you know, they really don't see what's right in front of them.
All right, so now Yates takes the stand and she testifies.
So let's have a cut of her.
We were concerned that the American people had been misled about the underlying conduct and what General Flynn had done.
And additionally, that we weren't the only ones that knew all of this.
That the Russians also knew about what General Flynn had done.
And the Russians also knew that General Flynn had misled the vice president and others.
Because in the media accounts, it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating what General Flynn had told them.
And that this was a problem.
Because not only did we believe that the Russians knew this, but that they likely had proof of this information.
And that created a compromise situation, a situation where the national security advisor essentially could be blackmailed by the Russians.
So, first of all, you know, she's very attractive, very calm.
She handled herself beautifully.
She has a lovely accent.
You know, she has a great southern accent.
You know, you're looking at a future senatorial candidate.
In fact, with the state that the Democrats are in, she could be their future presidential candidate because they haven't got anybody else.
I mean, the best thing about her for the Democrats is that she's not 112 years old, and she actually doesn't have the shrill voice of most Democrat women.
So she's like, you know, she did a good job.
But all she's saying is, I warned them, you know, Mike Pence didn't lie when he went forward and said that Flynn hadn't spoken to the Russian ambassador about the sanctions.
He had been lied to.
He had been misled.
He had been misled.
We don't even know that he had lied to her.
But remember, We do not know what Flynn said.
We just don't know.
So now the Republicans bring up this other issue, the issue of the one crime that we know was committed, the one crime, which was the exposing of Flynn's name to the Washington Post.
And listen, we're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube because we want you to hear Mona Charon today talking about the Never Trump, where Never Trump stands at this point.
But, you know, that shouldn't stop you from coming over to the DailyWire.com, where if you subscribe, you can be in the mailbag and answer all, will answer all your questions, change your life, possibly even for the better, but don't count on it.
Okay, so now Chuck Grassley starts to question Yates and General James Clapper, who's the former director of national intelligence, and he asks them whether they were the ones who, whether they had unmasked people in these conversations.
In other words, if you're allowed to wiretap the Russian ambassador, but if you catch an American on there, his name is masked.
And you have to ask to unmask it.
You have to have security clearance and leaking it is a crime.
Did either of you ever request the unmasking of Mr. Trump, his associates, or any member of Congress?
Yes, in one case I did.
I can specifically recall, but I can't discuss it any further than that.
You can't.
So if I ask you for details, you said you can't discuss that.
Is that what you said?
Not here.
Okay.
Ms. Yates, can you answer that question?
Did you ever request unmasking of Mr. Trump, his associates, or any member of Congress?
No.
Question two, did either of you ever review classified documents in which Mr. Trump, his associates, or members of Congress had been unmasked?
Oh, yes.
You have.
Can you give us details here?
No, I can't.
Ms. Yates, have you?
Yes, I have, and no, I can't give you details.
Okay, so this is not a big news day.
I understand why this is a lead story.
But if you're a reporter, a fair reporter, isn't the lead story that Yates testifies how she warned Trump and they don't get any new information about who unmasked these names.
She refused to talk about who unmasked these names.
That seemed to me part of the story.
But we've already heard that we're getting this explosive news about how, you know, about from a woman who was fired shortly after she warned the Trump administration.
I mean, a completely fake narrative.
So here's the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper, you may have heard of it, reporting on this story.
Twice warned Trump stuck by Flynn despite ties to Russia.
Boy, they got this narrative thing down, like just that, you know, here's the subhead.
After Sally Yates warned President Trump that his national security advisor, Michael T. Flynn, was vulnerable to foreign blackmail, Mr. Flynn held his job for 18 more days.
Ms. Yates' testimony, along with a separate revelation Monday that President Barack Obama had warned Mr. Trump not to hire Mr. Flynn, offered a more complete public account of Mr. Flynn's stunning fall from one of the nation's most important security posts.
It also raised fresh doubts about Mr. Trump's judgment.
To whom?
In whose mind?
Did it raise fresh doubts?
You know, that's just like a loose phrase that's just out there.
His judgment in keeping Mr. Flynn in place despite serious Justice Department concerns.
Now, let's just, I've got to unpack that just for a minute.
You know, somebody comes into your office and tells you that somebody you trust and believe in has done something wrong.
18 days is not too long to wait to find out what's going on and to fire him and to think it through and to make sure you're treating him fairly and all those things.
This is not a scandal, you know.
And by the way, there's also a second front page story, how the White House explains waiting to fire Flynn, how they explain.
I mean, it doesn't take that much explanation.
The fact that Obama, you know, Sean Spicer dealt with this the other day, the fact that Obama didn't like Flynn.
Flynn was a constant critic of Obama's policy regarding ISIS.
Flynn was right.
Obama was wrong.
Obama kept saying ISIS isn't that big a threat.
Flynn was like writing books about how crazy he was.
No big surprise that Obama didn't like it.
And then afterwards, Trump tweets, biggest story today between Clapper and Yates is on surveillance.
Why doesn't media report on this hashtag fake news?
I mean, look, I don't know.
You know, it seems to me this whole Trump collusion thing just seems like an absolute smokescreen.
It seems absolutely nonsense.
Maybe Paul Manafort was doing stuff with the Russians.
Paul Manafort got fired again.
You know, Trump was getting his sea legs.
This does not seem like a big story to me.
Even Dianne Feinstein said she had no proof of it and all this stuff.
But this, the way the media covers it, is the story now.
The way the media covers everything about Trump is the story, and they make Trump look great.
They make his tweets look smart.
They make his objections to them look smart.
They make his insults to him look smart.
What you are hearing is the dying roar, what you're hearing from places like the New York Times is the dying roar of a corrupt and dishonest industry that has been caught.
They have been caught out lying, and they cannot convince themselves that everyone can see them.
And they make Trump look terrific.
All right, let's bring on Mona Charon.
I'm so glad to have her on.
She is a syndicated columnist and political analyst.
She lives in Washington, D.C. She's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Institute and host of the Need to Know podcast, as well as the author of two New York Times best-selling books, the 2003 book, Useful Idiots, How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, and her 2005 book, Do-Gooders, How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help and the Rest of Us.
Useful Idiots, by the way.
Still Blame America First00:12:20
I've read both these books.
Useful Idiots.
If you've never read Useful Idiots, you've got to read it.
It's just about how the left gave cover to the communists during the Cold War.
It's really so well researched.
It's so well written.
Great stuff.
Mona, there you are.
How you doing?
I am.
Hi, True.
It's good to see you.
It's been a long time.
Likewise.
Agreed.
And thank you for mentioning the books.
I'll just tell you, I have a third book coming along.
It's almost finished, and look for it.
I think you'll like it in particular because it's about the history of feminism.
Oh, great.
Send me a copy.
You are coming back on.
You must come back on and talk about this.
I will.
All right.
You know, I wanted to bring you on because, first of all, if there's anybody on the right who deserves the phrase universally respected, it is you.
You never go off.
You're never extreme.
You never go off and say anything crazy.
But you were a firm never-Trumper.
I mean, a year ago, really this very day, you were writing about how never-Trumpism was the only way to preserve conservative values.
Kind of like our own Ben Shapiro, but we can't trust Ben, so that's why I brought you on.
How do you feel now?
How are you feeling about the Trump administration so far?
Well, you know, there's a line out there that, oh, these never-Trumpers, they refuse to acknowledge that anything good has come of this administration.
They're locked into their tunnel vision and so forth.
And I actually don't think that's quite true, or at least it isn't true of many of the people who were in that camp that I read.
I've praised many things that Trump has done since he took office.
So have lots of other critics of Trump, particularly the appointment of Neil Gorsuch.
But there has also been a corresponding tendency that you don't see talked about that much, which is among conservatives who argued that, well, they were just holding their noses and voting for Trump because the alternative was Hillary and it was really just agonizing.
But after all, we had to choose one or the other.
So very reluctantly we choose Trump.
Now you see a lot of those people sort of becoming Trump, as Brett Stevens put it, Trump explainers, becoming willing to justify and back anything that he does.
And so I resist both of those extremes, if you will.
Not to sound too Barack Obama-y, you know.
He always claimed that.
Yeah, there's always a third way, right?
The middle ground, you know.
But I do think that the Trump administration still represents a threat to many things that I hold dear as a conservative.
And if you like, I would like to propose an agenda that would be populist slash conservative, although I resist the term populism completely, but where I think conservatives can remember their roots and possibly make connections with Trump and Trumpism, if there even is such a thing.
And it would be this.
I mean, let's look at the ways in which as a government, because there are cultural things that are going on that are arguably a lot more important than what the government does, but government is not unimportant.
If I were looking for a conservative agenda and an agenda that sincere conservatives would be advocating with Trump, it would be looking through the entire federal government and picking out anything that discourages marriage, that discourages work, that discourages savings and investment.
Those should be our goals because that is what has arguably held us back and arguably undermines the traits, the character traits that are crucial for a self-governing democracy.
But Trump, I mean, my reaction to Trump, and I'm sort of one of the people who probably would be accused of explaining Trump, having truly held my nose and voted for him because I thought Hillary was a genuine, I thought Hillary was a genuine threat to the American experiment.
When I see, I accepted that Trump was basically a constitutional Democrat, like in his heart, I think he's kind of a Democrat.
But the stuff that has happened, Gorsuch, the new slate of 10 judges he's proposed for the appellate courts, the rollback of regulations, things I never thought I'd live to see, basically, I've been kind of delighted with some of the things that's happening.
Not all of them.
But if George W. Bush had done as much as Trump had done, wouldn't we have glossed over some of, didn't we, in fact, gloss over some of George W. Bush's left-leaning mistakes and his overweening foreign policy?
We all have a tendency to be tribal.
We all have a tendency to want to defend our own side and attack the opposition.
That's natural, and you can't really eliminate it entirely from the human heart.
But you can attempt, at least, to be fair-minded.
And I get the sense among many people that that has been thrown out the window, that there is no interest in fair-mindedness and being faithful to the truth as you see it.
Instead, all that seems, well, not all, but there is a definite flavor on the right of wanting just to put a stick in the eye of the opposition and watch them scream in pain.
And if that happens, that makes our side happy.
I find that.
You're kind of happy, Mona.
I got to admit.
So in the long run, I don't think that's the best.
Obviously, there are certain things that, you know, I celebrate with you and Gorsuch and the court nominees.
It's very, very important.
But it's not the only thing.
And people should not feel shy about speaking up when this president does things like say this so-called judge has issued a ruling.
Now, admittedly, he followed the law, so that's great and quite reassuring, I might add.
But when he lies, when he says, I'm going to release my tax returns and then doesn't, or when there's evidence of really the kind of corruption which, let's face it, if it had been Chelsea Clinton over in China, as we saw Jared Kushner recently, selling visas to come to the United States for 500 grand contributions to his business.
Imagine if Chelsea Clinton had done that, what people on our side would be saying.
And so my plea is don't become someone who just is blinded to your own side's faults and says, you know, I'm going to overlook that and be, you know, hypocritical.
I think we should try to be straight and honest and call them out when they do really shameful things.
That selling of visas, hard to imagine how anyone could even begin to justify that.
And what is what, to your mind right now, as we sit here, let's talk about it politically for a minute.
What is the worst thing about the Trump administration as it's unfolding?
Well, the worst thing at the moment, believe it or not, is the failure of the president to hire enough people.
There are all of these federal bureaucracies that are sitting empty.
They've got a cabinet secretary and nobody underneath, except then, you know, nobody in those political slots.
And so instead, what you have are the career people making all the decisions, basically, because just having a secretary is not nearly enough.
You need to have that whole layer of political appointees who guide policy and make the decisions about regulations and about a lot of other things that affect our lives.
And I've even heard some people in this administration saying, well, we don't need to fill all those posts anyway.
Who needs more bureaucrats?
But they're not bureaucrats.
Those are the political appointees.
That's worrisome.
It's funny.
It is worrisome, and I understand that.
That The Guardian, a left-wing newspaper, did point out that if Trump were actually the fascist authoritarian that they feared he would be, the first thing he would have done was taken control of the machinery of government.
And he hasn't even done that.
You know, there's that old saying, you know, that if you're given a choice between two interpretations, one of which is conspiracy and the other is incompetence, over incompetence every time.
And so I think that's certainly the case here.
But so I'm concerned about the fact that he hasn't filled these positions and therefore reversing some of the things, some of the damage that Obama did, it may not happen.
I mean, you only have so much time once you've been elected, the clock is ticking, and political opportunities, if not used, will be squandered.
So I'm concerned about that.
I'm also deeply, deeply concerned about the moral tone that this president sets and what it says about our side.
When he says, in response to a question about Putin and Putin killing people, oh, you know, what?
You think we don't kill people?
You think we're so innocent?
That was the worst.
That, to me, has been the lowest point of the administration so far.
Yes.
Just horrifying.
It undermines our moral standing and I think it corrupts our understanding of what America is in the world.
And it shows such a little appreciation on the part of our president for the country he is fortunate to lead.
It was a dumb, dumb thing to say, and I said so at the time, and I agree.
But let me, my last question, let me just, I want to push back from this other point of view, and this is the thing that has kind of been guiding me.
You know, I really do feel that the left has, the Democrats, not just the left, it would be one thing if it were just the left, but it's the Democrats, have lost the plot of American freedom.
When I look at the things that, for instance, Justice Breyer writes about the First Amendment and how it's not there to protect the speech of individuals and this whole corporate idea they have that it's there to create an atmosphere for democracy it's.
I mean these guys no longer believe in free speech, they no longer believe in gun rights.
They really, I mean I was reading a piece in the NEW Yorker, that Adam Gopnik piece.
Maybe the entire American Revolution was a mistake.
I think that's where they're all headed, and it does seem to me that Trump, for all his flaws and I certainly admit he has flaws has has put a doorstop in that movement and, and I think that there's something to celebrate there, along with his big mouth and his occasionally ignorant statements.
Is there any?
Can I get any?
Uh, hallelujah for that.
Or is it completely too happy?
Well, I think look, that struggle um, between their understanding of of what it means to be an American and ours is going to continue with or without Trump, and and I think that my own view is that Trump actually impedes that fight rather than helps us, for a whole variety of reasons, some of which have to do with the quote that I just gave you.
I think that he too, as a lifelong Democrat, doesn't really understand the nature of freedom, the nature of our democratic experiment in this country, what makes America exceptional and unique?
He has said he doesn't like that term.
I don't think he understands it, and and so it.
My general feeling is, though he has done some very good things from the point of view of right, regulation and a few other things that this will not end well, but that doesn't mean that that the, the United States's fate is is sealed.
I hope that more and more people will see the logic of our arguments.
I hope we'll make them in a way that doesn't repel people.
I'm I'm really disturbed by how polarized we've become.
Still Believing in Persuasion00:07:24
Maybe I'm nuts, but I still believe in persuasion.
I still think there's a chance for bridge building and trying to find common ground.
Even though they drive us crazy, I still think it's worth the chance.
You know, I knew bringing you on would be a tonic, because you really do address these in a calm way.
To address these issues in a calm way, it's great talk.
It's always great to see you.
Where can people find your stuff?
Okay, so they can read me on Nationalreview.com.
They can look up my um columns as well as my podcasts On Ricochet.com.
And in just about a year, maybe less, I have a new book coming out, as I mentioned, about the feminist mistake.
Oh, wow.
I love it.
Well, I'll definitely have you back on then, if not before.
It's great to see you, Mona.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
Mona Charon, really, really nice, incredibly nice person, but also just an incredibly sane person, which, as we know, in politics, is really difficult to find.
All right, stuff I like.
So this week I wanted to take a look at some Bible verses and how they resonate in the culture and in pop culture, you know, just in ordinary things, because so much of who we are and what we think and how we even imagine our lives comes from the Bible.
And this is one of my favorite Bible sections.
I shouldn't call it a verse.
It's one of my favorite Bible stories.
It is the story of Moses discovering the burning bush, and in some ways, with the Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, non-sacrifice of Isaac, is the kind of formation of this people, the reformation of this people after their slavery in Egypt.
And of course, you know, the Hebrews are enslaved in Egypt because they made the mistake of going for the Pharaoh's socialism.
The Pharaoh was collecting everybody's grain and then distributing it during the famine.
And the Hebrews unfortunately fell for that and they became slaves.
And Moses has escaped from Egypt and he is acting as a shepherd.
And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the mist of a bush.
He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.
And Moses said, I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.
Now God says, I have heard my people.
I've heard that they're in trouble.
We're going to get them out of there.
I'm going to send you down in to free the people.
And Moses says to God, Moses doesn't want to go.
Like all God's prophets, he's like, Yeah, you know, I'm actually having my hair done that week.
You know, he's like, please get me out of this.
And Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, what is his name?
What shall I say to them?
And God said to Moses, I am who I am.
And he said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you.
And this to me is one of the most profound passages in all of literature.
In all of literature, this is one of the most profound passages because it shows you not, it shows you this image, this wonderful, wonderful image.
I mean, if it weren't God writing the story, you would think, like, who thinks of things like this?
But the answer is God.
And it is a bush, which is, of course, a symbol of fruition, of fruitfulness, of growth, of nature, on fire, which is, of course, a symbol of destruction in eternal coexistence, right?
The bush is burning, but it's never consumed.
So we've seen the entire system of nature, this apparently random system of nature, of things growing and things dying, of things coming to fruition and things being destroyed.
And yet, and yet, out of this apparently random and endless and unteleological system without an end, without a purpose, out comes a voice that says, I am.
Okay?
And to me, this is saying, this is an act of faith and trust.
And it's not faith and trust for Moses because he's hearing it, but for the rest of us, it is an act of faith and trust that this incredible, seemingly random system of nature and its destruction and its creation has a personality.
It is the expression.
I shouldn't say it has a personality.
It is the expression and the emanation of a personality, a God who has a purpose and has a viewpoint.
He has a people.
He wants the people to be free.
He wants people to act so that people can be free.
And he is speaking out of his being.
I am.
This thing that you see in front of you, this seemingly random thing that you see in front of you, is the expression of a person.
When I say a person, I don't mean a human being, I mean a personality, somebody who has a nature that we can relate to, that we can speak with, that we can connect to, and that we can understand, and we can act on whose half, on whose behalf we can act.
And this is, there are two ways of looking at life.
One is that it is this random series of events.
We are thrown out here in a world of death and life.
We're born, we live, we die, we disappear.
And there is this other system that all of this, all that we see in its apparent randomness, is the expression of a personality in whose image we are made and whom we can relate to.
And, you know, I don't have time to talk about this today, but it is in some ways the difference between Shakespeare's two great late plays.
One is, of course, King Lear, and the other is, oh my gosh, The Tempest.
And these are almost the same play about a guy and his daughters.
One guy has one daughter and one guy has three daughters.
But one is an expression of this random tragedy, this utter tragedy.
It ends with King Lear, his famous line, howl, howl, howl, howl, you know, just absolutely an expression of grief.
Whereas the expression of Prospero, as he throws away, he gives away his creative powers and lets his daughter free is the expression of the end of a comedy of more marriage, more life.
And he's the one who says, our revels now are ended.
These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits shall dissolve.
And like this insubstantial pageant, faded, leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with the sleep.
And of course, in one sense, that talks about life is kind of an illusion, the same illusion as the theater.
But the theater is written by somebody, and dreams have a dreamer.
And so he's really talking about a kind of order that our life is grass.
We come, we go, and yet there is something bigger that is guiding his life.
And Prospero's fatherhood is filled with value and authority and understanding in a way King Lear simply is not.
But if you really want to see expressions of nihilism, expressions of that burning bush without the voice of I Am, you have to turn to really modern works and modern thrillers are some of the best ones.
There is a book, I know I've mentioned it before, a book called The Ruins by Scott Smith.
I think Scott Smith is a fantastic novelist.
I think he is an underrated novelist.
I mean, he is a bestseller.
Stephen King recognized his book, A Simple Plan, which you've probably at least seen the movie of.
One of the most unfortunate things about Scott Smith is he spends his time in Hollywood writing bad movies of his wonderful books.
And if you read The Ruins, it is a pure expression of absolute randomness in nature.
Open Water Predators00:02:06
Nature is here.
It doesn't care about you.
It doesn't care about your love.
It doesn't care about your life.
It doesn't care about anything about you.
It just is here to devour you.
That's what it's here for.
And it is the burning bush without the voice of God within it.
And the other is the 2003 film Open Water.
And Open Water, I loved when I saw it as an expression of nihilism.
I think, you know, it's very hard to express nihilism in a way that matters.
And it's about, it's based on a true story.
It's about two people who go on a scuba diving trip in the Caribbean, and just by a series of accidents, they are left behind.
They're left behind in the water, in the open water, with the sharks.
Here's just a quick glimpse of these two, their lovers, left behind in the open water.
Daniel, is that a shark?
Baby.
Or a dolphin.
If it was a dolphin, you'd be on your way over there to play with it.
You obviously think it was a shark.
That's all we need right now.
You were petting this shark less than an hour ago.
Please, that was nothing but a big old catfish.
It was more than two hours ago.
Now, now I'm starting to really get cold.
It's okay.
I thought he said he'd never come that close.
They also said the boat would be here.
Two ways of looking at life.
A random system of open water filled with predators and prey and a personality speaking to us.
I am...
Both of those systems make internal sense, and the reason is God wants us to be free, as he told Moses.
He wants his people to be free to decide.
All right, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Tomorrow is the mailbag.
Get your questions in, and we will solve all the problems of your life completely, just completely.